Paradise, for some, is simply an empty beach on a Caribbean island.
But for wild creatures this is not a destination, but a dividing line.
Here the tranquil inland world comes to an end and a far more
complex and surprising one begins.
Vast coral reefs and sandy plains shimmer beneath
the crystal Caribbean Sea.
And the tropical sun illuminates an array of living jewels.
Here are creatures rare and fantastic.
Here are figments of our nightmares and flights of wonderful fancy
from our dreams.
In waters famed for hidden treasure, another kind of wealth is
stunningly abundant.
Here, immersed in beauty and subtle mystery, we now discover
the JEWELS oF THE C ARIBBEAN SEA.
The largest living structures
onplanet Earth are controlled from outer space.
Every year, with uncanny precision, the orbiting moon somehow
sets in motion the process of spawning in coral reefs throughout the world.
The same response occurs at different times in great coral reef systems
from the Red Sea to the pacific and greater Caribbean.
Tiny bundles of brain coral eggs and sperm rise like miniature moons.
Millions of them flood the sea.
Different species of coral respond in different ways.
Some corals are hermaphroditic and release packages
that contain both eggs and sperm.
Other types release them separately.
It is all unbelievably subtle and complex.
The great blooming mass of eggs and sperm floats to the surface
where the eggs will be fertilized and become larvae.
The larvae will drift, sometimes for many weeks,
Before setting to be bottom and perhaps beginning a new reef
a hundred miles away.
The result of a few minute coral larvae given thousands of years
to grow and reproduce can be this a city in the sea the glory
of the Caribbean.
It is home to creatures as tiny as a single bacteria
as huge as the manta ray.
Coral reefs may be hundreds of feet thick, many miles in length.
They are by far the largest structures created by living creatures.
Yet they are made almost entirely from the skeletons of tiny coral polyps,
some the size of a single pearl.
The living coral grows about half an inch a year.
It lies upon the skeletons of dead coral, layer upon layer.
Along the edge of the reef we are seeing growth that took
thousands of years.
Twenty feet down we are on the reef that Columbus might have seen.
At 85 feet we are in the time of Christ.
At 180 feet we have reached the time of the pyramids.
Around the reef great predators roam.
A Caribbean reef shark snaps up the weak and the unwary.
These swift killers don't always prevail. In slow motion a small snapper
makes a quick turn, tumbles down the shark's back,
and slips off its tail.
Those that escape a shark may fall victim to a black grouper.
But the coral city is a community of strange alliances where the threat
of sudden death can be mysteriously suspended.
This coral head is a special place. It's called a cleaning station.
Tiny cleaner gobies cluster near the base of the coral head.
The tiger grouper often visits here.
Trusting in an ancient and mysterious relationship,
the gobies do not hesitate at the tiger's mouth.
The gobies are allowed to crawl all over,
feeding on parasites and dead tissue.
In return, every inch of the grouper is sanitized and groomed.
Other cleaners have other clients. This pederson shrimp,
waving its white antennae, is issuing an invitation
and is accepted by a Nassau grouper.
Cleaning is a striking example of symbiotic behavior.
As a result of its service, the cleaner is fed.
And the fish that is cleaned is healthier as a result.
But researchers suspect that the simple pleasure it provides
is also important a sensuous interval in the struggle to survive.
The shrimp is allowed astonishing liberites.
It crawls through the delicate gills in search of tiny parasites
that irritate the host.
On the reef many creatures may not travel more than a few inches
in their entire lives.
But others are visitors creatures who have come here on journeys
of thousands of miles.
During these winter months, parts of the Caribbean fill
with the music of humpback whales.
The whales come here from far to the north.
Little or no feeding takes place during the several months
they stay here.
Males give themselves to fighting for the right to escort a females,
and females are giving birth and caring for their calves.
In early spring they'll head back north as far as Greenland
and Barffin Island one of the greatest migrations in the ocean.
In a winter storm a hundred years ago, a steel sailing ship
carrying molasses
from Caribbean plantations sank here on Little Bahama bank
Drifting coral larvae have settled on the wreck,
and a new reef city is being born.
Coral polyps absorb calcium from seawater,
which they use to create
the hard structures that make up a reef home for a new community
ofjewel-like inhabitants.
>From its den beneath the collapsed bow of the wreck, a
loggerhead turtle
emerges to greet a new day.
Turtles, like whales, are tied to the surface by their need for air.
The loggerhead must breathe every 30 minutes or so.
Then he continues this leisurely but unrelenting search for food.
The slipper lobster has sacrificed speed for the protection
of camouflage.
Not exactly lightning fast himself, the loggerhead relies on persistence
and his powerful jaws.
Above the wreck, swifter predators are waiting.
The barracuda hovers around the reef most of the day.
Smaller fish tend to ignore it.
But everything can change in an instant if it gets hungry.
The highly maneuverable yellowtail snapper can sometimes
avoid becoming a meal.
These waters also swarm with ballyhoo often not as fortunate.
This is one of the most intelligent creatures on the reef
the Caribbean reef squid.
It is a creature from another world.
Their skins are alive with signals of great sophistication.
Not only can they warm that a predator is near, but they can even
distinguish one predator from another.
Males competing for the affections of a female engage in a kind of
visual combat, displaying spectacular colors and patterns.
No damage is done, the contest is highly ritualized.
Squid & courtship is also very visual a synchronized and
extravagant display.
The actual mating however, is so brief, it's almost invisible.
The male lunges at the female with a special arm,
attaching to her a packet of sperm.
The female can take her time deciding if she will accept the packet for
self-fertilization or later get rid of it,
rejecting it in favor of another.
In spring many reef creatures are breeding.
Excited schools of mating fish dance frenetically and animate
the placid Caribbean.
After mating, the male yellowhead jawfish is left by himself
with the fertilized eggs.
He has them in his mouth,
spitting them out from time to time to aerate them.
For five days he'll continue his tender vigil until
the baby jawfish finally hatch.
Hundreds of Cerole wrasse school in long columns as they migrate
every day across the reef.
They are deadly marauders, attacking new generations of other fish.
Parrotfish are spawning, and the arriving Creole wrasse
rush in to gorge themselves.
They eat the eggs the moment they are released by the female parrotfish.
Thousands of eggs vanish in a few seconds, but inevitably
some escape and a few tiny parrotfish survivors will inherit the reef.
The Creole wrasse stop by a cleaning station.
Ajuvenile Spanish hogfish fearlessly takes them on.
It dashes from wrasse to wrasse checking for parasites.
Requesting to be cleaned, the Creole wrasse stand on their head.
Then, as the hogfish moves on, the next wrasse dashes eagerly to
the head of the line
The smoke rising from this barrel sponge is a dense cloud of sperm.
When a sponge starts to spawn, it triggers a chain reaction
along the reef as others of the same species hurry to mix their spawn.
The sea is aswarm with their fertility.
High over the teeming city, clouds are gathering.
This is a springtime swarm of thimble jellies.
Ninety-five percent water, without brains or complex nervous systems,
they are little more than fragments of the sea itself.
Each is the size of a thumbnail.
Thimble jellyfish are armed with stinging cells
that carry a mild venom.
But this doesn't seem to discourage many inhabitants of the reef.
The clouds of thimble jellies drift out into the open sea
and into the haunt of giants.
Sperm whales spend most of their days diving far underwater
where they hunt for squid.
They surface every 45 minutes or so to breathe and bask
in the Caribbean sun.
But not all sperm whales plunge into the deep.
Newborn calves lack the endurance to make these epic dives
and must wait near the surface for their mothers to return to them.
This calf lools in a gentle sea as his mother descends a quarter of a mile.
As she soars through the darKness and searches undersea canyons
far below him in pursuit of squid,
he can still hear her familiar sonar clicks.
Fearless and playful, the lone baby whale turns and spins, exploring
the dexterity of his great body in the weightless freedom of oceanic space.
He is covered with remoras, harmless companions who cling to him
for a spectacular free ride.
When he learns to dive, they will probably leave him,
unable to stand the cold and pressure of the abyss.
The baby whale hears his mother returning and joins her to explore
their favorite waters deep channels off volcanic islands in the Caribbean.
They swim by islands packed with more and more hotels and holiday homes.
Seemingly lush and abundant, Caribbean ecosystems are very vulnerable
to the tourists who come here.
To make room for them, native vegetations is stripped away.
Over the years ecosystems disappear and so do the creatures
that inhabit them on land and in the sea.
The dark patches behinds the shelter of the reef are prairies of turtle grass.
They cover hundreds of square miles of the shallow banks.
This is home to a manatee. Once great numbers of
these gentle undersea mammals grazed here.
How the sight of one is like encountering a lone buffalo
on the midwestern prairie.
Remoras cling to the manatee. They get food from its waste.
The lone manatee probably gains nothing but companionship.
The gentle stately manatee faces many dangers.
Today, its greatest enemy is probably pollution.
Easy targets for a harpoon, manatees once were hunted almost to extinction,
and poachers still take them when they can.
Only the tip of the snout is exposed while breathing.
Manatees are highly vulnerable to being hit by motor boats and jet skis.
Many bear propeller scars and many die of their wounds.
When manatees are not feeding, they are often sleeping.
Despite the camera, this one is just dropping off.
There he's fast asleep, oblivious to the tide of change
sweeping away his world.
The manatee's fate, and that of dozens of other species,
depends largely on strangers who pass this way briefly
and travel in splendid isolation.
Few of these travelers are aware of their fatal impact on the wonders
all about them, great and small.
The reef at night.
Many fish sleep. This redtail parrotfish slumbers with eyes open,
lying on her side on the coral.
As a prelude to mating, a spiny lobster male gently caresses
the carapace of a female.
Lobster larvae, when they are born, look like spun glass.
The spiny lobster female helps her tiny larvae into the world.
She agitates her tail to help move them out into the current.
By the thousands the tiny larvae drift past their mother's eye,
never to be seen by her again.
Larvae, eggs, plankton, and tiny fish all drift out from the reef,
a dazzling assortment of creatures cast with seeming carelessness
onto the sea wind.
This is a venomous sea wasp. Its stinging tentacles find larval fish,
which are quickly anesthetized and consumed.
Reef squid lie in wait for passing fish and crustaceans.
And out of the darKness a giant manta ray joins the feast.
The manta loops to stay in the area most dense with plankton.
It's maneuver as graceful as it is efficient.
The arms on either side of her face are cephalic lobes
that channel plankton into a foot-wide mouth.
Her wings span six feet and she weights several hundred pounds.
All night the eerie feast of plankton will go on.
Out on the prairie a pearlfish stands on its head,
mimicking the surrounding turtle grass.
Camouflage makes it almost invisible.
This unappealing animal is a sea cucumber.
It consumes sediments, which are filtered internally for
digestible bits of organic matter.
It is also home for the pearlfish. When in danger, the pearlfish
Locates the rear end of the sea cucumber with its nose.
Then it inserts its sharply tapered tail and slips back into
the cucumber's anus to reach a safe hiding place in the intestine.
The pearlfish obviously benefits.
But what's in it for the sea cucumber, if anything, is not Known.
Comes a sultry Caribbean dawn, and the placid sea gives no hint
of the night's events.
A baby loggerhead turtle emerges from the sand to greet its first day.
It begins a life that could last more than 60 years,
orjust a few minutes.
Turtles produce abundant young, but only a few will survive
to carry on their species.
The baby heads instinctively for its ocean home.
If a female, she may return to this very beach to lay her own eggs
in 25 years or so.
If a male, he will never again leave the water.
Now the baby turtle must cross the reef and make its way to
the open ocean. It's a dangerous crossing.
Predators gather quickly when the sea is full of hatching turtles.
But this turtle is lucky.
After 36 hours of nonstop swimming, the hatchling finds shelter.
It will spend its first year near the sargassum fronds, later head north,
then eastward across the Atlantic to the Azores and the Canary Islands.
The flotsam of the sea accumulates where ocean currents converge.
Sargassum weed and other drifting plant and animal life also gather here,
along with an increasing mass of human rubbish.
Jellyfish congregate here too, and one is the first meal
for the newly hatched loggerhead.
These waters often teem with jellyfish
and some of them are voracious predators.
This large stinging cauliflower has captured several moon jellies.
They are helpless in its deadly tentacles.
The medusa fish may be resistant to the cauliflower's stinging cells
orjust incredibly nimble.
It feeds on scraps and leftovers from the cauliflower's meals
and uses the broad bell as a personal magic carpet.
Convergent currents drive moon jellyfish together
by the tens of thousands.
Their translucent bodies form a gently pulsing cathedral in the sea.
The sargassum weed is a safe nursery for many Caribbean reef fish.
Spawned on the reef, schools of baby fish hide here in the open sea
until they are old enough to return to their more hazardous home.
A loggerhead turtle is hunting for lobster.
The lobster uses its spiny antennae.
They are covered with sharp barbs and the lobster aims them
at the turtle's eyes with uncanny accuracy.
Eventually the loggerhead discouraged and returns to his home in the wreck
In a long, slow-paced life, one lobster more or less
makes little difference.
Adult loggerheads lead settled lives.
They hunt by day and at night usually hole up to sleep
in a favorite crevice.
Another turtle, a hawksbill, is on the prowl.
She eats sponges.
She spends her days searching out the varieties she likes best.
When she finds one, she contents herself with just a few bites
and then moves on.
The sponge will survive.
Its tissue will heal and later the turtle will be back for more.
For the French angelfish the sponge is now an easy meal,
because the turtle has torn through its outer layer.
But this sponge has a defender.
Some damselfish are farmers.
They cultivate patches of algae on sponges that they rely on for food.
Although the queen angelfish is many times the size of a damsel,
the little fish is unrelenting.
It will attack almost anything to protect the algae farm.
Other kinds of algae have changed the face of the Caribbean.
As they grow, several species concentrate calcium in their tissues.
When they die, the calcified skeletons of these plants decompose
and become find sand.
It's Known for its delicate grain and brilliant whiteness.
After thousands of years this sand has created sand banks that can stretch
for miles between and shore.
Plains of this and other types of sand are scattered throughout the Caribbean.
Seemingly barren deserts, they are home for many creatures
that specialize in concealment and camouflage.
A male peacock flounder has excellent eyesight.
He watches from a high sand mound, trying to spot a mate.
At last, a female.
He confronts her and displays his long pectoral fin.
Seducing her will not be easy.
The female is not sufficiently impressed. He must try again.
He displays all the signals signals proper for his species,
but still she is unresponsive.
A cold fish indeed.
A curious mutton snapper butts in just as the reluctant female
begins to show some interest.
Finally she responds.
It all ends with a single exquisite shiver and a tiny puff of spawn.
During the long summer day the voices of dolphins
can often be heard across the sandy plains.
These are Atlantic spotted dolphin.
Like other mammals, dolphin babies are nourished by mother's milk,
which is squirted into their mouths under pressure.
Baby spotted dolphins don't develop their spots for a few years.
Dolphins are social and very intelligent animals,
and their private lives are highly visible here in the open.
These dolphins relax here after a night of vigorous hunting.
During the day the look for flounder
and razorfish that lie concealed on the bottom.
The dolphin's sensitive sonar can locate prey partially buried
in the sand.
Once discovered, a small fish has little chance to escape.
Dolphin's are extremely efficient hunters.
They are very playful and have plenty of time to fool around.
Like chimpanzees and other intelligent mammals,
they often reinforce their social bonds with sexual behavior.
What starts as gentle foreplay soon turns to mating.
Dolphins mate belly to belly.
The large gray dolphins here are male bottlenose dolphins
a completely different species.
Female spotted dolphins pet the bottlenoses and coax them to play.
Soon this becomes a sensual frenzy.
The two species will mate, an event only recently recorded in the wild.
As a result there may be hybrid young, but they will probably be sterile
and have no offspring of their own.
Dolphins show hyper-sexuality in captivity
and this is often attributed to boredom.
But films like this confirm that they are also highly sexual
in the wild.
It has never been demonstrate that dolphins have language as we Know it.
But these dolphin vocalizations, slowed down six times,
show just how much information could be conveyed
by their intricate sounds.
The dolphin language, if any, remains an unsolved riddle to science.
Whatever their meaning, dolphin sounds are rich and varied, an essential part
of their social lives and an expression of their soaring spirit.
For weeks in summer the dolphins' playground is mirror-still,
a warm and crystal sea seemingly frozen in time.
Then, finally, the long summer ends when the first winter storm clouds
start to gather over the reef.
The jewels of the Caribbean take shelter.
As winter arrives among the creatures that seek safety and security
on the reef is the spiny lobster.
Lobsters group together and dash for the safety of deep water
at the edge of the reef.
They are in the open here, vulnerable to predators,
so speed equals survival.
One lobster takes the lead,
seeking the shortest course to the protection of the reef.
Each following lobster uses its antennae to engage the one ahead.
Like racing cars, they take advantage of the draft.
The train of lobsters makes the trip faster than one could traveling alone.
Their trek ends at the reef.
Here they find calm water protected from storms.
Spreading out over the reef, each will find a sheltering hole
or crevice that will serve as its winter home.
Another winter visitor has only just arrived.
Returning to this city in the sea,
humpback whales have come back from the north.
A mother humpback whale is sleeping.
Her newborn calf snuggles under her chin.
Calves spend their days playing, nursing, and just basking
in an ocean filled with the songs of whales.
The Caribbean is an ideal nursery for the baby humpbacks.
They're 12 to 14 feet long at birth and grow very quickly.
They'll each take up to 50 gallons of milk a day and soon be strong enough
to make the long journey north.
The round trip is over 8,000 miles.
Once these humpback whales were hunted almost to extinction.
Only a hundred or so wintered in the Caribbean.
Now they have made a modest comeback
But all is not well in their environment.
Each time they return, these waters are increasingly unfamiliar.
This area once included thousands of manatees, reef sharks, and grouper.
Now many of them are gone.
The reef itself has declined. Many of its jewels are missing.
In just a few years there has been dramatic change.
One reason is a new predator, ever more common,
that strikes from above.
Fisherman of the Caribbean cast their nets.
Their hunt for food from waters around the reef is more and more intense.
Their methods are increasingly sophisticated and life is strained
from the sea.
Longlines are set for groupers and sharks, and lures are trawled
through the waters by game fishermen.
In some places the remaining jewels look to a future shadowed by change.
Their homes are not what they used to be.
New reefs grow on structures that are artificial and for the residents
are fraught with danger.
Oil rigs provide shelter on one hand,
the threat of spills and pollution on the other.
And these new reefs may not endure for thousands of years.
They are here today by man's whim and could easily be gone tomorrow.
In these devastating times
a new creature has come to the reef the sport diver.
Because of divers, sea life is increasingly valuable alive and free.
This single shark brings millions of tourist dollars
to the Bahamas every year.
This grouper attracts thousands to resorts in the Cayman islands.
These dolphins play with thousands of divers, bringing wealth
to the struggling nations of the West Indies.
So there is a new form of symbiotic behavior in the undersea world.
Marine creatures bring joy to creatures of the land and we, in turn,
must provide protection against the ravages of overfishing and pollution.
Above all, now there are human witnesses to the damage humans
are doing here.
There is still a wealth of precious jewels strewn about the Caribbean,
and there is still time to save them.