The beach of the Middle Caye where waves hit seemed clean from the glance. Gray and white field of coral grave made calming splash as the wave slowly crashed. However, the seemingly pristine beach was bearing bits and pieces of human trash when we saw it with the agenda of cleaning the beach. Plastic bottles, nets, ropes, toothbrush, and deformed my little pony lingered around the crevasses and under the porous coral skeletons. But most alarming pieces were the brittle plastics that crumbled as we picked them carelessly. Our civilized world would not tolerate these plastic powders enter our body. However these crumbles will flow back into the ocean with the tide and latch onto any animals that might consume them unknowingly and eventually end up in our own as we eat them. Standing on that beach I pictured a futuristic one where there are more trash than water and the sky was thick with gas as we have dug up everything with value from the ground and thrown up in the air and waters after a day’s use.
In the afternoon we went through the mangrove to dive in another patch reef. The water was hot like a bathtub. There were some healthy corals but many of the patches were covered in brown algae. Thinking of how algae compete with corals, seeing so many of my taxa wasn’t so joyful. I was able to find a species of brown algae I haven’t seen before. Otherwise I saw massive number of Turbinaria and Dictyota covering the structures underwater.
