Ecologist Jim Porter and his doctoral advisee, Kathryn Patterson, uncover the killer of a once-dominant coral species

B Y - A L E X - C R E V A R - ( A B - ' 9 3 )

n the Sand Key coral reef, six miles south-southwest of Key West, schools of parrotfish, angelfish, and white-spotted filefish carpet moon crater contours with incandescence. Amongst the sea life, 35 feet beneath their boat, UGA ecologist Jim Porter and his research team perform an aquatic ballet—toting spools of chain, video cameras, and placards through shadows and alongside the occasional turtle or nurse shark. Outfitted with air tanks and shiny white pads of waterproof paper, the group looks alien. But their movements are so efficient and functional that in intention anyway, they could be ocean dwellers.

The team of seven scientists—members of the Coral Reef Monitoring Program sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—has been entering the deep daily during this year's May-to-August research season. For Porter, 56, the mission's lead scientist—a broad-shouldered man with more pepper-than-salt gray hair—this has been his routine, through one study or another, for more than 30 years. For the two other UGA researchers on the crew—marine sciences doctoral student Kathryn Patterson and ecology graduate student Cecilia Torres—salt water has become atmospheric.

What inspires people to subject themselves to the dangers of sea lice and decompression sickness 1,000 hours a year? They are pursuing the killers of the most diverse ecosystem on Earth: the coral that once packed Florida's reefs. And what the researchers have found are populations dying at rates previously unimaginable. The planet's oldest and most evolved communities have vanished in only a handful of years.

Among the coral diseases the scientists track—black band, white band, white plaque, yellow blotch, red band, and dark spot, to name a few—one has been making the biggest news: white pox. That's because white pox has delivered a mortal blow to the Caribbean elkhorn coral (scientific name: Acropora palmata), once the most dominant species on the shallow reefs surrounding the Keys but now an endangered-species candidate. And until this June, when a paper co-authored by Patterson and Porter appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the reason for the elkhorn's sudden demise was a mystery. What is now known is white pox's agent of destruction: Serratia marcescens. This bacterium has wiped out 85 percent of the elkhorn population (in some places, 98 percent) within the UGA team's area of study: the 2,800 square nautical miles of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, which stretches from Miami to 80 miles west of Key West in the Dry Tortugas. Still unknown are the bacterium's conspiracy ring accomplices. But, as in nearly every scenario of coral destruction, humans are the prime suspects.

orter began monitoring Caribbean coral reefs in 1976. Back then, Florida's southern tip, from Florida Bay (below the Everglades) to the Keys, was known for it's "gin-clear water." People flock to this chain of more than 100 islands—which look like the drippings made when the Florida peninsula was sloshed from frying pan to plate—to fish, dive, snorkel, sunbathe, and luxuriate near America's only extensive coral reefs. Forty-two bridges and 110 miles separate the mainland from Key West, but it feels like much more. On this island famous for lawlessness, rum running, and tolerance—of everything from business practices to sexual orientation—people come to escape and act like pirates for a while.

Key West retains its otherworldly feel; there is still more Cuba than U.S. in the crags of its cobbled, flood-prone streets lined with palms, tropical mahoganies, and saba trees, whose meandering roots threaten to reclaim the sidewalks. You can still spend an entire day walking the docks, shopping for souvenirs, or saddling up at some drinking hole for an iced-cold sarsaparilla, and never once risk entering a conversation that isn't happily unhinged. One also gets the impression, though, that Key West has become a parody of itself. Gingerbread houses now crowd the pirate island that only somewhat jokingly declared itself the Conch Republic in 1982, and Sloppy Joe's is no longer where Hemingway went to get away from wife Pauline and vanquish cocktails until sunrise—it's a t-shirt.

But more disconcerting than image issues or inflated real estate prices is the fact that more and more people are coming to Key West, and the Keys overall, to join in the lampoon. In the 1960s, the Keys' population (no island is bigger than a handful of city blocks) hovered around 45,000. Today, it's just under 81,000 year-round residents, with another 3 million tourists annually. The boom has helped to turn that gin-clear water into a dangerous environmental concoction. The reason for the change, if you ask any local, is that the delicate balance needed to sustain the fragile existence, which the Keys cling to, has shifted. And nothing, states Porter, provides a better barometer of lopsided coastal living than coral reefs. If that adage is true, the symptoms of sickness in the Keys, already a rash below the surface, are on the verge of bursting through to the epidermis. "What coral reefs provide is a wonderful early warning system," says Porter, topside after his first research dive of the day on a crystal blue morning in August. "It's not too difficult to see that we have extreme problems with our water quality and recreational practices when these creatures, the crown jewels of evolution, begin to disappear."

At the Key West Bait and Tackle Shop, just off the marina at Mallory Square (famous for sunsets that fall off the horizon at the southernmost point in the U. S.), the most local of locals gather to swap real and tall tales. On stools around a rickety bamboo bar, they reminisce about an island they love and the problems it faces. Behind the beer taps, a bumper sticker asks, "If it's tourist season, why can't we shoot them?"

"People who come here don't give a damn," says Red Dog, a wisp of a man with dying gums, a long red beard, and a gnarled wit. Red Dog came to Key West in the 1950s after a brief career as a pro hockey goalie ("Bobby Orr skating at you is the scariest thing you can imagine"). "They come here and trot around on top of the reefs like it's a damn dance floor. They drag anchors, too." Red Dog swirls the last of the liquid in the bottom of his can and gives way to Great White Bassett, captain of the boat Porter dove from earlier in the day. Bassett moved to Key West after tours in Vietnam as a gunboat captain and covert diver. "It's true," he says, "the reefs are like graveyards. Everything here was once dense with sea life and the most beautiful thing on Earth. Now it's just dead."

n easy way for land dwellers to think of coral reefs is as animals in a reef forest, which houses thousands of creatures. Although many think of corals as plants or rocks, they are, in fact, animals. It's easy to understand the confusion. Corals are not active the way many swimming or running vertebrates are, and from the look of them—branching and upturned toward the sun—they resemble sea shrubs or trees. In fact, the famed taxonomist, Carl Linnaeus, incorrectly classified them as plants (the only major group misclassified from inception) only to be trumped by one of his students. His student realized that regardless of appearance, over their limestone skeletons—which become part of the reef upon death—corals possess countless zooplankton-hungry mouths called polyps. But as fixed invertebrates (related to sea anemones), coral survival does necessitate creative industry, which it accomplishes by renting part of itself to algae. The algae, in turn, produce chlorophyll (giving coral its color) and continue to photosynthesize. This relationship puts coral, technically only 90 percent animal, into a perfect symbiotic partnership where all the wastes of one associate are the needed supplies of the other. Algal oxygen emissions, for example, nourish coral, and nitrogen from coral fertilizes algae.

Though the conditions for survival are narrow—ocean temperatures between 72 and 85 degrees, constant salinity levels, and shallow depth (35 feet or less) for sunlight—corals define self-reliance. Capable of living even if hermetically sealed in a jar (given a light source), corals are not just part of the ecosystem in which they live, they are themselves an ecosystem. Unlike all other organisms, which observe the 10 percent rule—1,000 calories of sunlight goes from grass to grasshopper to frog to trout and then to human, where only .01 calories remain because 90 percent is lost in each step of the food chain—corals observe their very own 95-percent rule, with only 5percent (total) lost along the way.

"Every one of these [coral] species is a success story of how to survive on planet Earth," says Porter. "Whereas, humans generate high productivity (rice fields, sugar cane plantations) at the expense of high diversity, corals have learned to support high productivity and high biological diversity. They do it all, and if humans—on the planet 1 million years—intend to survive as long as coral—250 million years—they need to adjust."

Coral reefs are by far the most diverse environments on Earth with 32 animal phyla found in their confines (rain forests only contain nine). The myriad of sea life coral reefs support hefts the weight of the $3.1 billion generated in water-related activities every year in the Keys, according to Porter. So when the most diverse and oldest communities on the planet begin to vanish, taking with them income and a coastal barrier used as natural protection for million-dollar homes, people, especially scientists, and pocketbooks start to ask why. The problem though—beyond the slow pace of experimentation—is that a lot of people are frightened about what researchers might find. This was certainly the case with the Porter crew's findings over the past six years, culminating in last June's publication and peer review.

The study began, when, in the course of its reef monitoring duties, the research team received a tip from Craig Quirolo, a diver and founder of the non-profit Reef Relief in Key West. Quirolo had noticed small white lesions developing on elkhorn coral around the Keys. Porter named the lesions, "white pox" because of their propensity to spread and Kathryn Patterson knew she had found the subject of her doctoral research. "Coral disease research is a new field, so besides the fact that coral was dying, it's exciting," says Patterson, who came to Georgia from Wellesley because her father and University trustee, Alexander Patterson, knew Porter and suggested him to Kathryn for her graduate work. In the year she began with Porter, 1995, Patterson shared duties with another Porter advisee, former Rhodes Scholar Rob Sutherland (BS '96, MS '96). "Also, this research is something that really matters," continues Patterson. "A lot of people might not realize that coral, and elkhorn especially, provide food, shelter, and homes for many organisms, as well as recreation, food, and protection from beach erosion for people."

Porter and Patterson began photographing the disease on seven different sites around the Keys Sanctuary. Above each site, they left the boat with a PVC pipe rectangle—4.5 meters squared—that equaled one-third of the transect boundary on the ocean floor below. Then, within that boundary, they used a quadrapod also made of PVC, which Porter invented as a camera mount, to keep a controlled distance directly above the coral that would mimic the dimensions of a single photographic slide. They took 12 quadrapod photos within each boundary, and then moved the boundary two more times for the 36 shots in a roll of film. This gave them a contiguous area of 13.5 square meters, which is large enough to be representative of the site. As well as slide photos, they took cotton swab and water syringe samples of the afflicted areas. "When you work down here, you find out quickly how deliberate and efficient you have to be," says Porter. "It's easy to glorify what we do, but when you do it you realize it is just day after day of dealing with weather, strong currents, and how much air you have left in your tank. Murphy's law works overtime underwater." The team knows the exact spot of their transects, for year-to-year comparison photos, by locating the coordinates of eight stainless steel stakes—used to secure the PVC frames—drilled into the sea floor at each site.

What the duo of Porter and Patterson found was that elkhorn coral, once the most dominant species in the Caribbean, was fading fast. The giant three-dimensional branches, so important to marine life, were being destroyed faster than they could be replaced by new growth. The question, of course, was why. Hurricanes, the elkhorn's major nemesis up to that point, could be ruled out and the disease's propensity for contagion eliminated snail predation. After six years of observation, a bevy of swab samples and syringe specimens, the source of the disease was shown to be bacterial—a fact the team knew as early as spring 2001. But what broke the study beyond "safe science" making politicians, businessmen, and naysayers wince—". . . some of them, I suppose, think we do junk science," says Porter—was the bacteria in question: Serratia marcescens.

"Which is why we had to be dead on sure that we had its identification right," says Porter. "This marks the first time, ever, that a common gut microorganism has been identified as a marine invertebrate pathogen." Translation: this is the first time a bacterium found in humans can be linked to a disease that is killing the oldest community on earth—silencing the critics, who disregard the ill effects of dumping waste and rerouting agricultural runoff unless scientists can painstakingly prove the side-effects.

"[Patterson] and [Porter's] findings add great weight to the hypothesis that human sewage pollution may contribute to coral losses," says Bill Kruczynski, a scientist with the EPA. "The findings add to the incentive for improving wastewater and stormwater management systems in the Keys." All of which sound obvious to the environmentally conscious citizen but, in fact, it wasn't until 1989 that Key West added a secondary sewage treatment facility. Prior to 1989, nearly seven million gallons of raw sewage was discharged directly into Key West Harbor daily. And it was not until 2001 that an advanced wastewater treatment facility was installed. In the decade between, beach closings were a regular occurrence. Though, according to utilities director David Fernandez, the new system is now "cutting edge," it is likely that by 2001 (if sewage is a culprit) the fast-moving white pox—which eats coral flesh, leaving lifeless limestone skeletons, and can kill 100-year-old corals in weeks—had already done its damage.

"But sewage is only 30 percent of the problem," says Brian Lapointe, a nutrient and algal scientist at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Vero Beach, Florida. "There are a number of other factors, including global warming and agricultural runoff from both the Everglades and Mississippi River. S. marcescens doesn't need fecal matter, it just needs fuel, organic material, which comes in abundance with nitrogen, organic carbon, mercury, and the like from inland farm runoff that is not filtered before it makes it to the sea. When that fuel is abundant, it messes up the sea's balance. What Jim and his team have potentially proven is that humans are providing a fuel source for disease."

The new image a land dweller might now have for the sea floor is one permanently adjusted by a foreign infusion of nutrients and bacteria. As the system becomes high enough in nutrients, the environment encourages algal dominance and the water becomes murky green. This cloudy water doesn't allow enough sunlight, killing corals and the innumerable species which depend upon them. Coral disappearance could eventually lead to a lack of limestone necessary for the reef building that protects the beaches where families live and play.

n 1992, Porter testified before a joint hearing of Congress on the matter of coral health. His summons came after he had spiked the Ocean Science Policy Board's radar screen the previous year with the delivery of a paper to the American Society of Zoologists outlining his seven-year Florida Keys study. The research arguably represented a high-water mark in the publicity of coral disease surveillance up to that point in the science's suckling history. (The etiology of marine diseases is still, in 2002, a new science as evidenced by The Ecology and Etiology of Newly Emerging Marine Diseases edited by Porter, released in 2001, and published by Kluwer Academic Publishers.) What he found in Florida was an overwhelming trend toward coral decline. Such an out-of-sight, out-of-mind possibility had never entered the thoughts of many scientists, much less the overall public. The problem, though, was that he couldn't identify exact reasons for the die-offs, a point of contention for those who demand alacrity, and for landlubber lab scientists with the luxury of infinite replication.

"When we felt the trends could no longer be ignored, around 1991, we made our first assertions," says Porter. "Our views were not popular and I accepted the criticism, which came from state officials and other scientists, that we needed more samples and time. The Keys reefs are big business and nobody likes bad news." But Porter had already decided to adopt Davy Crockett's motto: "Be sure you're right, then go ahead." In doing so, he and associate Ouida Meyer (PhD '96), became the first to quantify coral loss in the Florida Keys. So, it was with genuine alarm that the late South Florida Congressman Dante Fascell responded to the slideshow Porter narrated in the halls of Congress during his testimony.

Fascell: "[Multiple expletives] Are you telling me that that's my state?" He points at the slide projector and asks, "Does that thing go backward?"

Porter: "Yes sir, it does."

Fascell: "Prove to me that those pictures were taken in the same place."

Porter: Shows landmarks within the images that prove the two slides, one from 1984 and the other from 1991, were taken in the same location. "Same place, there's just no coral now."

The information Porter provided to Congress aided the decision to fund the Coral Reef Monitoring Program, which is overseen by the EPA (for the last four years, NOAA has also shared the funding cost). This is not exactly what you'd expect from a boy from Tiffin, Ohio, who never swam in the ocean until after graduation from Yale with an undergraduate entomology degree. It's fair to say that Porter's dedication to the Earth's oceans was spurred by a fortuitous sequence of events.

As a first-year student at Yale, Porter was obliged to take P.E., which for freshman traditionally meant a class called calisthenics. Attempting to avoid a period of watching the second hand, he signed up for pool, thinking that meant billiards. He did not realize that the course was "pool," as in, "report to the." The class turned out to be a scuba course in which there were 20 spots—19 filled by seniors. Of the other 50 underclassmen waiting, 49 were dismissed because they had not had senior lifesaving training. Only Porter's hand remained in the air because of a course he'd taken on Lake Erie. To this day, little known to dive masters and boat captains, the only scuba credential Porter possesses is his Yale, 10-foot pool certificate.

After graduation, he became the assistant to a marine biologist, whose work took them both from Tierra del Fuego to Panama investigating shell structures. The trip marked Porter's reacquaintance with diving, when a scientist from the Smithsonian's Panama lab needed a partner. "I was nervous as hell," remembers Porter, "I'd never been in the ocean and didn't recognize anything I saw underwater. That moment is when I decided to dedicate my life to it."

In 1977, after teaching four years at Michigan and tracking coral numbers outside of Discovery Bay, Jamaica, Porter—and his wife, fellow Yale PhD graduate Karen Porter—was recruited to UGA by the late Eugene Odum, whom many know as the father of modern ecology. "Eugene loaned us $2,000 to get our house started and gave us the kind of support people so greatly admired him for." Within the Institute of Ecology, now part of the newly configured College of Environment and Design (see "New colleges to the rescue"), Porter has served as the graduate coordinator of the degree program and as the associate director for academic affairs.

But after 25 years at UGA, the setting for his primary passion, according to Porter, "is a place many researchers with tenure abandon all together"—the classroom. He has motivated more than 600 students to pursue graduate and professional studies, and has sent two to Oxford as Rhodes scholars—Beth Shapiro (BS '99, MS '99) and Sutherland. "But," says Porter, "the most important thing I do is teach Ecology 1000 every semester. Ecology is the study of life and how we succeed in preserving our environment will determine the fate of mankind. I try to teach well because it really matters. I try to inspire the hell out of every student." In one of the last letters he penned, Odum himself wrote in support of Porter's nomination for the 2003 Eugene P. Odum Award for Excellence in Ecology Education: ". . . I have experienced first hand his extraordinary teaching skills." And with regard to his students who achieve doctoral degrees and become professors Odum writes, "I know of no other ecologist who has accomplished this level of success. . . . [His students] tell me that he is the best teacher they have ever had."

Even for a morning class, there are no late-comers to Porter's "Intro to Ecology" class, which meets in the building's auditorium. Students who arrive on time must scramble to find seats. When Porter starts to speak the room falls silent and the barrage begins. A powerpoint presentation is interspersed with news clips and movie snippets. He has samples of coral moving in one direction around the room and 18th century text books describing early taxonomy moving in the other. Porter is armed with a clip-on microphone and a laser beam pointer, which he wields in rehearsed, jedi fashion.

"The hallmark of Dr. Porter's lectures is impeccable preparation," says Sutherland. "He does not slouch behind a podium. His lectures are a dynamic and engaging multimedia onslaught."

According to director of UGA's Institute of Ecology Ron Carroll, Porter's courses fill within minutes on class registration day because he is one of the world's leading conservation biologists and his classes are baptismal. "I am sure he's converted a few," says Carroll, who has served as the institute's head for a dozen years. The UGA ecology program is ranked as one of the country's five best by the National Academy of Sciences, sharing a short list with UC Davis, Michigan, Duke, and Harvard. "His message is important but Jim's charisma is what really allows him to carry that message so effectively."

At an open lecture Oct. 9—Coral Loss in the Florida Keys: Science for Humanists—designed for scientists, faculty, students, and the general public, Porter wowed the silent audience with a slew of new graphs, color codings, and a stream of video bites that filled a 20-foot screen. "White pox is the most destructive coral disease known," he told them. "This is the worst case scenario for a coral reef. . . . It is a harbinger of an ominous evolutionary trend—a jump from fully terrestrial to fully marine."

Between teaching, stirring public sentiment, and publishing—which in 2002 included a 1,000-page book edited by him and his wife Karen: The Everglades, Florida Bay, and Coral Reefs of the Florida Keys—Porter must still find time for that which brings him the most publicity: discovering and monitoring marine diseases. And this year he has already identified two new maladies—cavernosa crud, which affects the Montastraea cavernosa (great star coral) and a previously unknown ring disease on elkhorn coral. "Jim's long-term monitoring . . . is some of the best of this type of work in the world," says Lapointe. "Few, if any, have his extensive experience and level of expertise."

s newborn as the science of coral disease is (especially in relation to the age of its subjects), the fact that humans kill coral reefs is not news. For decades, people have played the roles of anchor draggers, boat grounders, sea poachers, and then subsequent souvenir hockers. And even with the heightened profile surrounding the endangerment of each coral species, one could go to any popular underwater site in the world and find dozens of divers prancing upon and gouging through entire communities of coral animals, all for the love of nature. As one Mother Jones magazine article states, "We know why the reefs are dying: They are allergic to us."

Nearly two-thirds of the Earth's population lives within 200 miles of a seacoast. Many of the rest flock to beaches every chance they get, generating around $200 billion in annual, global revenues from scuba diving, snorkeling, and resorts. The price of human carelessness, according to the UN Environment Program World Conservation Monitoring Center, is that 58 percent of the world's coral reefs are now at risk. Besides their recreational possibilities and their value as the source of food for hundreds of millions of people, coral reefs provide a crucial coastal barrier, which ensures the safety and livelihood of those 4 billion seaside residents. According to one study, when coral was washed away in the Maldives (Indian Ocean), it cost $10 million per half mile to build a seawall to protect the coastline.

"The coral reef is part of the ocean where, by and large, life is the most abundant," says Bob Weir—the former guitarist of the Grateful Dead and co-founder (with his sister Wendy Weir) of the non-profit organization Coral Forest—from his home in California. "The far-reaching destruction of these exquisite treasures is more than an aesthetic concern . . . for mankind to survive into more than the near future, we will have to learn to check our ruinous ways and live harmoniously with nature." But for all the realization that cities, cruise ships, and agricultural runoffs don't mix well with the fragile reef metropolises, it was not until Porter and Patterson's discovery that researchers could hang their hat on the fact that the by-products found in people really do kill coral. And if, as some claim, the bacterium is due to the endangered key deer population (about 700 total) or more viably, fish or birds, which also carry S. marcescens, there must be a food source, according to Reef Relief's Craig Quirolo. "The fish are eating something they shouldn't be eating . . . likely fueled by sewage, ag runoff, and global warming—all of which humans are responsible for. Most of our problems come from the love of the almighty dollar. What [Porter's] and [Patterson's] paper did was bring everyone in line—the oil boys, the politicians, the developers—and it makes sure they can't make excuses anymore."

Globally, coral reefs are in such jeopardy that some studies estimate three-quarters of them will be gone by 2030. This means that for 70 million Florida tourists every year, for commercial fishermen, and for beachfront property owners, it could all be over. Hundreds of millions of years of creation and evolution gone in less than one human lifetime.

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