Mother Jones
Grand Cayman Island is a speck of white sand about twice the size of Manhattan floating in the Caribbean Sea halfway between Cuba and Belize. It’s known mainly as an offshore tax haven—”Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort spoke to a gathering of business leaders there recently—and as a stopover for cruise ships packed with sunburned Americans sipping bright blue cocktails with paper umbrellas.
It’s also a key haven of marine biodiversity, sporting 36 different coral species (corals are tiny animals that build rock-like reef structures) and 350 kinds of fish. Generally speaking, coral reefs are some of the most ecologically rich habitats on Earth, supporting 25 percent of marine life in less than one percent of the ocean environment. They’re a first line of defense for coastal communities against devastating storm surges. In Cayman, as in many small island nations, reefs are the backbone of the local tourism and subsistence fishing industries. And they’re rapidly dying off.
A study published last October found that on reefs around Little Cayman, a kind of suburb island adjacent to Grand Cayman, coral cover fell from 26 to 14 percent just between 1999 and 2004. Since the early 1980s, coral cover across the entire Caribbean has plummeted 80 percent, so that living corals now cover only 10 percent, on average, of available surface area. And a 2011 report from the World Resources Institute that labeled reefs around Grand Cayman as highly threatened found that what’s happening there is a microcosm of a global trend: 90 percent of the world’s coral will be at risk of disappearance by 2030, thanks primarily to ocean acidification and global warming, both products of greenhouse gases released by human activity.
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WATCH: These Reefs Are Beautiful—But Most of the Coral Is Dead
