First, a healthy reef is not healthy everywhere. In the same way that a falling giant tree will create a clearing in the jungle and start a competition among younger trees to reach the sky, a coral reef will have patches of death that will become alive in due time.
    This morning we dove at a site near La Paloma pass, the only significant channel connecting the lagoon and the fore reef on the southern side of Kingman. Ten meters below our boat, the bottom was covered with coral rubble. A few hundred meters west or east, the corals are healthy and form a thick forest. But this patch is a reminder that there are greater forces operating in the world, and that even remote reefs cannot escape from them.
    Kingman was impacted by a Pacific-wide warming event in 1997-8, called El Niño. The surface waters became too warm for too long, many corals bleached, and some of these died. Corals died, but they recovered in most of the atoll. Why did they not recover at the site we visited this morning? Probably because this site is immediately west of La Paloma.
    The lagoon breathes with the tides, inhaling clean water from the central Pacific on the flow tide, and exhaling water filled with sediment from the lagoon on the ebb tide. The outgoing water from the lagoon is pushed westwards by the surface waves, which are in turn created by the trade winds, blowing mostly from east to west. This might have inhibited the recovery of the corals to date. However, the good news is that the rubble is scattered with thousands of small corals.
    Replenishment may take a while, but it is on its way. Paraphrasing Inspector Clouseau, everything nature does is carefully planned—or at least until we started to mess things up. Second, unlike what many people believe, sharks have not evolved for 300 million years with the sole mission of devouring every single human that sets a fin in the ocean. I mentioned earlier that sometimes sharks get quite close to us. Today, however, we could not get them close enough.
    The usual protocol consists of us jumping in the water, a dozen sharks coming to check us out, and then losing interest and leaving. They may come back during the dive, or especially when we climb back to the boat; they appear particularly bold at dusk. However, they never made any attempt to check if we taste good.
    This is what a healthy coral reef is supposed to be: abundant predators that have no particular interest in strange creatures with one large eye and two tails, and who produce noisy bubbles. The rest is all fantasy for cheap reality shows that appear to have replaced good natural history.

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