Luiz Rocha swims through a mixed school of triggerfish, chromis, and jacks off the coast of Ascension Island.
Rocha, a curator of ichthyology at the , and his Brazilian collaborators, and , have waited 20 years for this moment. Although they have all studied from afar and have published several papers about this 88-square-kilometer volcanic rock’s place in Atlantic Ocean biogeography, they’ve never actually set foot on its shores. Now, for the first time, they’re about to plunge into the clear, blue water of Ascension’s English Bay to witness this elegant natural experiment for themselves.
On this, their first day in the field, the team of four, including the enthusiastic and hard-working , a recent Master’s student of Floeter’s at the , are armed only with cameras (not to mention several decades’ worth of experience studying reef organisms in the Atlantic). On subsequent dives, they’ll swap the cameras for spears, nets, tape measures and an array of GoPros that they’ll anchor to the bottom at strategic locations. With only 12 days here, they know they’ll need to work quickly to collect as much data as possible. No one knows when or if they’ll be able to return to this strange and remote place, so they’re determined to learn as much as they can while they’re here.
Ascension Island sits , nearly equidistant from West Africa on one side and Brazil on the other. Ascension’s sister island and closest point of comparison, both geographically and biologically, is . At a distance of nearly 750 miles (1,200 kilometers), it’s the closest landmass in any direction. There are other islands and archipelagos in the Atlantic, but they’re all farther away and none sits as far out to sea as Ascension.
That isolation and the island’s relatively young age of 1.15 million years—by far the youngest of the tropical Atlantic islands—have painted a peculiar biological and ecological picture. To start, this is a tremendously challenging place for most species to reach. While large-bodied pelagic fish, like tuna and sharks, are able to make the trip as adults, most reef fishes rely on hardy larvae, friendly currents and a boatload of luck to cross the thousand or so miles of deep ocean from some distant coast before they can even hope to settle into suitable habitat here.
The odds are so poor, it’s astonishing any have managed to make the journey, but dozens have—nearly an equal number of species from the west as from the east, including reefs as far away as the Indian Ocean. At present, the number of successful colonizers sits at 108. Of these, 11 species are endemic, which means they’re found nowhere else on Earth—it also means they’ve been here long enough to have evolved and differentiated from the original gene pools from which they came.
Although Ascension has seen a fair number of these successful colonizations, the diversity here remains remarkably low. To put this into perspective, the island has about one-tenth the number of fish species you’d find within any similar-sized stretch of reef in the of the Indo-Pacific. Only two other islands in the tropical Atlantic have fewer coastal fish species than Ascension.
Still, as low as the diversity here is, the sheer number of fish is anything but. The nutrient-rich waters around Ascension support a staggering abundance of bodies. On this very first dive, we encounter breathtaking schools of just some of the species that have made it here: and , and , and one of Ascension’s best known species, the . At times, we’re absolutely surrounded by heavy, disk-shaped creatures, each one at least the size of a salad plate, many much larger than that. Rocha estimates that the density of fish here is 100 times what he saw during a recent trip to Bermuda. “It’s hard to even get a good picture,” he says of his efforts to capture individual portraits of Ascension’s endemics. “There’s always someone photo-bombing your shot.”
While many of the species here are found elsewhere, the scientists suspect the fish have likely found a wealth of open niches around Ascension—foods, breeding habitats and hiding places that would have been filled by any number of other species where they evolved. There might simply be an abundance of opportunity here, particularly for generalists or fish capable of a greater degree of plasticity in terms of behavior and food choices. The fact is, no one really knows. Aside from the basic list of ingredients—the age of the island, its location, size and the number of species that have managed to colonize the place—no one knows much about Ascension Island’s marine ecosystem. Where many of these fish came from, how long they’ve been here, and exactly how they’re making a living in this remote place is a mystery. That’s why these scientists have waited so long to come to Ascension, and why they’re so happy to be here now.
Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be watching as they examine the rich and strange marine community of Ascension Island. Next we’ll take a closer look at one of the island’s most iconic species, the black triggerfish, to try to better understand how it’s managed to become so wildly successful way out here above the mid-Atlantic ridge.
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