Within the Crucian Landscape: Want to SCUBA?

My first morning on island I met really great group of people who were in town for a wedding. They were spending a week in St Croix scuba diving and site seeing before the wedding, and the sister of the bride turned out to be a dive instructor at Cane Bay Dive Shop- just 8 minutes down the road from where we were staying. Every morning at breakfast they'd talk about what they saw, encourage me to sign up for classes and then they'd get in their blue jeep and head off for that day's dives and activities. It took me that weekend and the next to hop on the bandwagon, but the more I thought about the mysterious deep the more I realized that if I didn't take advantage of the diving here I would regret it for the rest of my life.

I am not a marine biologist, but I can tell you that coral reefs occupy only .1% of the world's ocean floor, yet 25% of marine fish species live in this ocean habitat (2010 NOAA). The sad news is that we have seen a 24% coral cover loss worldwide, and this number is from a study done in 2004- the percentage is probably a lot higher now. There are proximate drivers of degradation that include the relationship and ratio of algae and other organisms, disease, bleaching, slowed growth rates and low reproduction. But the underlying reasons for those causes of coral death are sediments and other land-based pollution, physical damage (also known as death by a thousand paper cuts), overfishing, climate change and ocean acidification. On top of that, the venomous Indo-Pacific Lionfish has now entered St. Croixs waters. Equipped with an exotic and highly successful hunt and defense strategy this fish has already impacted the reef ecosystem, and there is no easy solution to managing their population. All this is to say that the reef is in trouble, and while scientists are scrambling to better understand the threats on reef habitat and how to improve the situation, there is no end in sight.

This is a really cool critter- if you touch it with the tip of your finger it retracts so fast that it seems to disappear!

The terrible Lionfish! Don't they sort of look like monsters?

I don't know what this fish is called, but he seems somewhat affectionate

So I decided to become a certified open water diver. St. Croix has some of the best coral in the world, and with all the stresses on it I wanted to see it before it was too late. Also, there are certain parts of the equation that are within the realm of a Landscape Architect to protect- namely the sediments and land based pollution part. Through proper planting, grading and other site work Landscape Architects have the opportunity to decrease these stresses on reefs. I felt that seeing the reef ecosystem with my own eyes I would better appreciate what an incredible resource it is and why it must be protected.

I got certified at Cane Bay, and it took me a total of 3 days, over the course of 2 weekends and a few days of bookwork. The first time I tried breathing underwater in the pool I panicked- it was hard to trust a piece of equipment to keep me breathing, and the feeling of it was so foreign. But very soon I got the hang of breathing and even managed to remove and then clear my mask while underwater. My certification process required bookwork, quizzes and an exam, 5 confined water dives in a pool and 4 open water dives. I completed my certification last Saturday with a group of Cub Scouts on a boat in Fredericksted, and have been on two more dives since then. I would encourage anyone who is even slightly interested to learn to dive, or at least snorkel. The human body isn't equipped to spend time underwater, and so it can be very easy to go about your day to day business and never think about what is out there and what affect you might have on it. But the truth is that know it or not you are affecting it, and I think that if more people had to face the landscape that is in decline, improvement in the way we manage our land might happen a little faster.