LADY ELLIOT ISLAND
The colours are blues, only blues: clear sky and bands of differently deep ocean. The smells are sea-salt and the warm-woodyspicy-sweet of clove oil. The sounds are the complementary noises of a vessel moving in water and water moving against a vessel.
A row of clear plastic bags, each secured at the top, sits on the bench seat that runs along the side of this glass-bottomed boat. Each bag holds a few small fish – looking just like they have been purchased and packaged in a pet store. Small oval blue-black creatures with flecked white tails. Thin black and white striped creatures, the size and shape of a finger. These are reef fish, part of the marinescape I can see through the boat's clear floor. Reef fish, like clown fish and surgeon fish: Nemo and Dory. But these ones don't have a name yet – not cartoon names; species names.
The three scientists who've just hauled themselves – and these fish – out of the water are Mark Erdmann, Asia Armstrong, Christine Dudgeon. They drip and talk as they divest their diving gear: masks, tanks, snorkels, weights. These fish, they suspect, are new species. Unknown, unnamed, unclassified – to date. “We have things here we didn't have yesterday,” Erdmann remarks.
One bag, these small things – new things – swimming inside its clear caul. Tiny creatures from the hold of this water that ebbs and flows in the Great Barrier Reef: one of the most studied, most discussed and debated, most visited and imagined places on the face of the Earth.
Old fish, new fish
This is a story about some very small fish that haven't been studied before. In that way, it's a story about biodiversity and knowledge. A story about what science looks like in the particular place of this survey on this tiny island, at this particular time, the third decade of the third millennium. It's a story about the people who do this work, and why it matters. It's about accretion in the natural world, and in the world of knowledge and imagination too. It's curiosity and discovery; hope and optimism; and wonder. That's an important one. Maybe these aren't the words you'd expect about something rooted in science, but more and more, they feel like the best and biggest kinds of words to deploy.
The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is, famously, a best and biggest thing – not just the planet's largest living organism, but also the only structure on Earth built by a living community and visible from the Moon with the naked eye. At the southern end of its 3000km-span sits the fullstop of a coral cay – Lady Elliot Island (LEI). Just 45 hectares in size, the island can be circumnavigated on foot in less than
