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Andros and the American Museum:
A History of Science and the Science of History
by Daniel Brumbaugh, Ph.D., Marine Program Manager,
Center for Biodiversity and Conservation
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| | The author obtaining global position satellite (GPS) coordinates from a patch of red mangroves. |
When I first started looking at potential sites for a new marine research project, I quickly zeroed in on the Bahamas and, more specifically, the barrier reef system of Andros Island. The area offers many of the characteristics that we at the Museum's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation look for in a site: global significance in terms of the range of species, habitats, and ecosystem dynamics, as well as local and national conservation initiatives that would benefit from further scientific investigation. It seemed like exactly the right place to apply interdisciplinary biodiversity science to marine conservation, using taxonomic surveys in the field to test the effectiveness of marine habitat mapping with satellite and aerial remote sensing imagery.
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© Dan Brumbaugh / AMNH |
I was also aware of the Museum's previous research in the Bahamas, and was intrigued by the possibility of creating some form of institutional continuity. In the 1940s and 50s, Dr. Norman Newell, now Curator Emeritus in the Division of Paleontology, and the Museum's “dean of extinction studies,” worked extensively on the structure and origins of the Grand Bahamas Bank, including the Andros reef system on the Bank's eastern margin. As part of this geological research, he studied and sketched out the distributions of sand flats, seagrass meadows, and reef areas, and made observations on major biological communities here. In addition, from 1947 to the early 1970s, the Museum operated the Lerner Marine Laboratory on nearby Bimini—supporting the research of scientists from the Museum and elsewhere.
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What I didn't realize until later (when Dr. Tim Turnbull, an Andros project collaborator, brought it to my attention) was that the Museum's relationship with the Bahamas extends even further back, to the 1920s and again to Andros Island. Intending to recreate a realistic reef scene in New York City, Dr. Roy Waldo Miner, Curator of Living Invertebrates, led a series of three expeditions (1923, 1924, and 1926) to document aspects of the reef crest environment on Andros. These expeditions, and two others to Rose Island (1930, 1933), culminated in the Museum's spectacular “Bahaman* Coral Reef Group” (now the Andros Coral Reef diorama) in the Hall of Ocean Life (which had been right under my nose during the early discussions about Andros!) This ambitious exhibit has introduced millions of Museum-goers over the decades to the wondrous complexity of a classic Caribbean reef crest environment. Perhaps even more interesting for scientists, the scene—archetypal summary of observed natural conditions—also establishes a reference point of sorts for glimpsing how the reef ecosystem has changed since then.
In an article in Natural History, the Museum's magazine, Miner wrote: “The ideal museum group is not merely a work of art. It is a record of living beings in their natural state and environment, depicted in their proper relations to their surroundings, and emphasizing the truth that the real unit in nature is the association rather than the individual” (July-August 1931).
Because of the care taken in its design, the diorama, as well as the underwater photographs by Newell and his collaborators, provide some evidence of what many now consider to be bygone conditions. When Miner and company made their observations and collected their specimens, these reef systems were widespread and seemingly invulnerable; in another Natural History article, he described the elkhorn coral stands as “tangled thickets of marble trees tinted with saffron” (September-October 1933). After all, this species had evolved to withstand everything from hordes of coral-munching animals to the occasional hurricane. The diorama reflects this sense of ecosystem health and abundance, with plenty of live coral, no algal overgrowth, no signs of coral disease, and numerous big fish and crustaceans swimming and crawling around the reef neighborhood.
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© Dan Brumbaugh / AMNH |
Unfortunately, today's coral reefs are generally in much poorer shape—with widespread coral bleaching, sedimentation, disease outbreaks, algal blooms, and frequent overfishing. Since many of these onslaughts are the result of human activities, we clearly face many challenges in devising and implementing management strategies that will reduce the damage we cause and eventually turn the corner towards recovery. A necessary first step in this management process is the determination of baseline conditions so that the effects of new policies can be determined through the monitoring of subsequent changes.
As we start this process, however, the expeditions of Miner and Newell and the Museum's diorama help remind us that our current “baseline” is a far cry from what used to be. Because subtidal research blossomed only after the invention of scuba, approximately 50 years ago, too often our marine historical perspective is myopic. In addition, many (if not most) people suffer from the “shifting baseline” syndrome: “pristine” conditions are those they remember from their own youth, and degraded conditions are those they see later in their lives. In this way, the “baseline” tends to ratchet downward as degradations of previous generations are forgotten.
Even by the time of Miner's expeditions, most of the large animals in the Caribbean—vast numbers of sea turtles, manatees, groupers, sharks, and even Caribbean monk seals (now extinct)—had long before been hunted to low numbers by indigenous and colonial peoples. As our current baseline pales in comparison to the conditions captured in the Museum's diorama, so does the latter view pale with what must have existed 500 years ago, before the colonial population explosion across the Caribbean. Though our direct memories of past conditions are inevitably limited to the experiences of our own lifetimes, when it comes to setting environmental goals and policies, it is critical to think more expansively about history.
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Although we face new challenges in managing reef systems, we also have new tools to help us. Miner and Newell, working in the pre-scuba years, relied on observational methods such as a windowed metal tube lowered from a boat and brass breathing helmets supplied with air pumped from the surface. These devices allowed them limited access to small pockets of the marine realm, which they and museum artists sketched, painted, photographed, and filmed.
Today, in addition to scuba, we have many types of satellite and aerial remote sensing data, global positioning system (GPS) units, and geographical information systems (GIS). While it is necessary to take advantage of these technological tools as we try to expand our scientific analyses from the local to the regional, it is often important to retain a classical approach of getting out and looking at details in the field. In this project, we are doing both–mapping shallow marine habitats using remote sensing data, and then surveying these habitats for many groups of marine life. In this way, we will be able to determine whether the habitats we can see from above are serving as adequate representatives for the biodiversity of marine environments. If so, the increasingly employed short cut of using habitats as management proxies for resident species assemblages will be validated. In answering these topical questions, we will also leave a record of our work for future researchers. Long after some of our analyses have become outmoded by advancing technologies, today's baseline records, along with those of previous generations, will remain an invaluable legacy.
*Note: “Bahamian” has since been adopted by the government as the official form.
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