In Shenzhen, a city rich in marine resources, there is a group of people who care about the marine ecology, and they spontaneously set up the country's largest diver public welfare organization "Dive Love Dapeng" to clean up garbage and plant corals on the seabed, which is both a science and a test.
When he contacted Shen Xiaoming — or Bai Xiaojing, who is more familiar with the name for marine environmental protection — he was on a business trip in Dali. Still, when he talked to him about growing corals, he happily opened the conversation box on the other end of the phone.
By the way, the names Shen Xiaoming and Bai Xiaojing are not unfamiliar to me, but for a long time I did not know that this was the same person. It is said on the Internet that because he loved Wang Xiaobo, he gave himself this pen name with the style of "× small ×" and used it to "walk the rivers and lakes".
With the fast pace of the city of Shenzhen, over the years, his identity switching speed is also very fast, marathon runner / marine writer / photographer / subliminal love Dapeng director... There are more and more slashes under his personality signature. He had briefly become colleagues with me, but before I could get to know him, he resigned and left by nature restless. The next story, as many media have reported, he founded his own company and built a marine library by the sea, which is the first and currently the only private marine library in the country.
His focus shifted from land to sea.
He said that marine science popularization worker is one of his most important identities at present.
What would happen to the world if the corals disappeared?
Shen Xiaoming recalled that in 2011, he began to have a new hobby, that is, diving. When he first dived in Malaysia, he was surprised, excited and even shocked by the sight of the seabed that he had never seen before. Various fish swim by in groups, and the underwater light spots overlap the deep blue scenery, which makes him truly deeply appreciate the charm of the ocean.
In particular, when diving into the coral reef area, you find it more lively, as if you are in a downtown area, "you will hear the sound of gun shrimp hitting the water with their claws in the cave, you will hear the sound of the totoaba fish 'grunting', you will hear the 'grunting' sound of the naked toad fish, some fish sound like hammers hitting nails, some sound like whistles." ”
However, when he returned to Shenzhen Dapeng Bay to dive, he could not find such an experience.
"There was silence, and there was not a sound to be heard under the water."
The reason is that in previous years, some fishing boats have cleaned the seabed when they are carrying out fishing operations.
"Can it be recovered?" Can wild groupers and abalone come back? Someone asked Shen Xiaoming.
If the corals were planted, he said, they might come back.
It is necessary to first get to know corals, one of the oldest creatures on earth.
Coral refers to something that is formed by the aggregation of calcareous bones secreted by polyps, and is shaped like a branch, mostly red, and also white or black. Quote from the Han Dynasty Bangu "Xidu Fu": "Coral bishu, Zhou A was born." ”
You can imagine a scene like that, in the quiet depths of the ocean, the size of rice grains of coral, gathering in groups, multiplying from generation to generation, and the lime they secrete becomes a shell to protect themselves, and it is also petrified and compacted under the wash of the waves and time, and after thousands of years, it finally forms a colorful island reef.
For the ocean, corals are like rainforests on land. After the trees on the land are forested, many birds, animals, insects and other animals will gather inside. The same is true for coral reefs. According to statistics, a quarter of marine life depends on the presence of coral reefs for their livelihood. Even strong sharks and groupers grow from young individuals. At this time, they need a place for them to grow and hide from predators, and such a place is a coral reef.
What would the world be like without corals? Scientists have said that the domino effect that could lead to mass destruction, many marine species will disappear after their only food source disappears. In addition, coral reefs provide protection for coastlines, without which they would be rapidly eroded and many island nations could even be erased from the world map.
This reminds me that Einstein is said to have said that without bees, humans can only live for 4 years. This is because bees are involved in the pollination of many crops, and without bees pollinating, these crops will not be able to grow, and the human food chain will be broken. It doesn't matter if Einstein said it or not, whether it's exaggerated or not, what matters is that it shows us a terrible high correlation between life and life.
Then say coral, no, say Shen Xiaoming.
It is precisely because of the importance of coral to the ecology of the seabed that in 2014, Shen Xiaoming and his diver friends together established the country's largest diver public welfare organization, named "Dive Love Dapeng".
They mainly do two things.
One is to clean up the garbage on the seabed.
They have picked up a net tarpaulin half the size of a basketball court on the seabed, seen crabs, sea urchins and various fish that have been trapped in fishing nets, and seen many corals die after being covered by fishing nets, sacks, and plastic bags because the zooxanthellae on polyps cannot photosynthesize.
Shen Xiaoming mentioned such a thing in a speech:
"We often encounter situations where we forget to bring a swimsuit when going to the beach for a swim. It is very cheap to buy a swimsuit at the seaside shop, and some people think that it is wet and difficult to bring, so they put it on the beach when they run out, and the waves will bring the swimsuit back to the sea and cover the bathing suit on the coral on the bottom of the sea. The swimsuit I saw was draped over a very large piece of stony coral, and by the time I removed it, the stony coral below was albino. Such a large piece of coral takes seven or eight years to grow, but it only takes a 20-dollar swimsuit to destroy it. ”
The second is to carry out coral conservation, repair and plant corals, and strive to restore Shenzhen's coral reef resources.
They are a group of people who plant "trees" on the seabed.
The seabed is planted with "trees", and romance is only superficial
At the bottom of the silent sea, only the sound of "grunting" breathing can be heard. Shen Xiaoming swam around the sea like a fish, looking for coral branches that had been broken by typhoons and anchors. He collects the broken branches of coral and re-pastes the well-grown branches on the reef.
This is a scene of Shen Xiaoming and his partners planting corals on the seabed.
I have met such a title on the Internet: "There is a kind of romance, it is planted on the bottom of the sea in Shenzhen." Corals, the sea, planting, that kind of picture, think it is really romantic and poetic. However, if you actually get into the role rather than admiring it on the shore, you will know that planting corals is a college question and a test of volunteer professionalism.
Shen Xiaoming said that in the beginning, "Latent Love Dapeng" cooperated with a university in Zhanjiang, and the other party's method was to intercept wild seedlings, transplant them to artificial reefs, and then put them into the corresponding sea area. However, Qian Ai believes that the wild population of corals in Shenzhen is very rare, which will cause great pressure on the coral population, and the survival rate is also a problem. After working together for a while, they gave up working with the agency.
Another reason why they abandon the seedling cutting method is that as ecological law enforcement becomes more and more stringent, some illegal reclamation companies need to use corals to cover up ecological negligence, and when ecological compensation projects often become market demand with a scale of millions of yuan, driven by huge profits, the seedling cutting method has become the "best ecological makeup box". Sure enough, after the agency parted ways with the "Hidden Love Dapeng", it hit it off with a reclamation real estate enterprise in Hainan and used the "seedling cutting method" to smear the illegal reclamation project of the enterprise in Danzhou with ecological grease powder. Two years later, the real estate company exploded, leaving a field of chicken feathers, and the transplanted corals had albinoed to death.
Divers pick up broken branches of corals that have been broken by wind and wave anchors, fix them in a seabed nursery, and then replant them back onto the natural reef after recovering their health. In this purely manual way to save lives, every coral rescued is incremental.
Although the effect is slow and there is no scale effect, in the words of Shen Xiaoming, "the day arches a pawn, and it is not expected to be quick." ”
So far, "Hidden Love Dapeng" has nearly 3,000 volunteers, planted nearly 10,000 coral plants, and rescued countless coral stumps.
Of course, coral planting is also a technical activity, and Xia Jiaxiang, former secretary general of "Hidden Love Dapeng", has been planting corals on the seabed since 2013. At first, they went abroad to learn the scriptures, dived to the bottom of the sea to see, and people took an iron shelf and put coral seedlings on top. They came back and did the same, and as a result, the sea conditions were different, the shelves were just set up, and the two typhoons passed and all overturned. They also tried to grow corals with reinforced concrete structures. However, after the typhoon, some reinforced concrete reefs did not resist the power of the waves. Later, they consulted experts from the South China Sea Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with iron pipes and flexible hot melt pipes as the skeleton, the bottom was counterweighted, and plastic nets were hung on the pipe frame to plant corals, avoiding hard "carrying" with the waves, and finally succeeded.
It is not the coral that is to be saved, but the human heart
On the phone, Shen Xiaoming said a sentence that made a special impression on me.
Nature, he said, doesn't need to be saved, it just needs to stop the invasion.
Therefore, "Latent Love Dapeng" has a saying called "planting corals and planting people's hearts". In their view, it is not the coral that they want to save, but the human heart. The sea is so vast that you can't grow corals. In other words, if the problem of coral destruction is not fundamentally solved, the light coral species will not help.
Therefore, one of the focuses of their work is to carry out marine science education.
Fight like a coral.
In 2017, in order to attract participants through the marathon, the volunteers of "Hidden Love Dapeng" set up an organization called the "Coral Running Group", wearing coral-shaped headdresses and carrying garbage bags woven by fishermen's waste nets, while running to pick up garbage.
In order to investigate the biodiversity of the seabed, they repeatedly chose night diving.
"Coral conservation can't be done at night, and the census of biodiversity is different. In the sea, creatures that are active during the day are not the same as those that are active at night. Shen Xiaoming said.
Every night dive, they record in detail the marine life they photographed that day. Shen Xiaoming will also make some of the content into a small video and push it on his "Ocean Library" video number.
Of course, what excites them the most is that after squatting on the bottom of the sea for 4 nights, they filmed the scene of the ovulation of frost antler corals in its entirety. Later, this video also entered the Shenzhen Metro and was displayed to the public as a popular science material.
Every year on a full moon night, corals have a concentrated ovulation. Unfortunately, there was no record of coral ovulation in Shenzhen before. Therefore, this time shooting has rare historical significance.
As the core volunteer of "Hidden Love Dapeng", Huang Yu later photographed the spawning scene of reef-building stony corals of the national second-class protected animal in the wild for many times, which added precious image data to the marine database of Dapeng New Area.
"When corals lay their eggs, it's like powder snow in the sea, which is very beautiful." Huang Yu said.
Huang Yu, a Sichuan girl, has come to Shenzhen since graduating from university in 2000. She told me that her friends called her Little Universe, which was the nickname given to her by her grandmother, hoping that she would be as energetic as the universe.
It turned out that her grandmother was a soothsayer.
In 2016, she became obsessed with diving and first dived abroad because her family lived in Dapeng and was close to the sea. One day, when she jumped into the Bayberry Pit Sea, ten kilometers away from her home, she found that there was no creature at all on the bottom of the sea. It wasn't the sea in her mind.
There is a coral conservation station near the house, and "Dive Love Roc" is preparing to train divers for coral conservation. In this way, she became obsessed with growing corals on the seabed.
But one day, she couldn't help but cry in the sea. Not because of the danger of being entangled in fishing nets, nor because of the fear of not finding a diving partner at the bottom of the sea, but because the coral baby that has been pampered like a child for a winter is destroyed! At that moment, she felt that her child had been amputated!
It was at that moment that she realized that it was impossible to plant corals alone, but also to let more people understand and protect the ocean and build awareness of marine environmental protection.
Next, she put more energy into marine science popularization, made a coral protection post-wave plan, presented the beautiful pictures taken in Shenzhen's native ocean in the past three years, and launched the Dapeng native marine ecology tour exhibition; He founded a public welfare organization called "Yu You Walk Together" to contribute to marine science popularization and environmental protection.
She also participated in the live science commentary of coral spawning, and received more than 2.9 million traffic across the network.
In addition to the coral conservation project of "Submerged Love and Love Reef", "Hidden Love Dapeng" also has "Submerged Love Homeland", focusing on pan-coastal communities such as fishing villages, enterprises and schools, and promoting community participation in the common governance of marine ecology; "Subliminal Love Classroom" is a marine knowledge explanation for children in the fourth to sixth grades of local primary schools.
Speaking of "Subliminal Love Classroom", Xia Jiaxiang told a story.
He said that one day in 2014, he went to the village near the coral conservation station to avoid the rain, and when chatting with the locals, someone suddenly asked him, you teach us to protect the ocean every day, then I ask you a question, you can answer, I will obey you.
That person's question really asked Xia Jiaxiang down - if you are scratched at the bottom of the sea, do not use Band-Aids, how to stop the bleeding? Seeing that he could not answer, the other party told him that there is a kind of jade foot sea cucumber in the local area, fishermen accidentally injured at the beach, will find this sea cucumber, sea cucumber is stimulated, it will spit out a kind of internal organs called "Juweiss tubule", extremely sticky, applied to the wound, can quickly stop bleeding, but also promote scabs.
Xia Jiaxiang was fascinated. Later, they invited experts in marine ecology and youth curriculum design, and began to edit the marine ecology course "Diving Love Classroom" based on the marine common sense passed down from generation to generation in the fishing villages of Dapeng Peninsula. At present, the cumulative number of lectures in the "Subliminal Love Classroom" has exceeded 1,000.
▲Huang Yu
"Undersea City"
At the confluence of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, there is a large triangle of coral reefs that includes triangular waters between Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. It is known as the "Everest" of marine biodiversity, and some biological experts even believe that this may be the "center of the origin of life".
Not everyone in Shenzhen knows that Shenzhen is located at 22 degrees north latitude, with a coastline of 230 kilometers, and is located at the northern edge of the coral reef triangle. In particular, the eastern part of Shenzhen is connected with Dapeng Bay and Daya Bay, there is no industrial wastewater discharge, and there is also an ecological red line, which protects the environment very well and is very suitable for coral growth.
As the only city with coral distribution in the first-tier cities in the mainland, near Dapeng Nan'ao in the east, nearly 70 species of stony corals are spread over 193 hectares of sea area, echoing the mangrove wetlands in the western sea, forming Shenzhen's "marine ecological lungs".
In recent years, due to the implementation of the annual fishing moratorium, the improvement of the legal system, the strengthening of the publicity of coral protection, coupled with the continuous restoration and planting of corals, the marine ecology of the Dapeng Peninsula has been greatly improved. It is worth mentioning that at the southwest end of the peninsula, there is a last reservation for the continuation of world-class stony coral species with 47 species of stony corals, and in order to better protect it, shenzhen's only national marine park is being planned.
In addition, at the end of this year, the country's first national marine ranch with coral conservation as the theme will be built in Shenzhen, through the release of artificial reefs, breeding and stocking, conservation of fishery resources, as well as the protection of rare and endangered species, so that the habitat and fishery environment of aquatic organisms such as corals, black snapper, grouper, moray eel, Man's needleless squid and other aquatic organisms will be restored, the fishery population resources will be increased, and biodiversity will be maintained.
Such prospects are worth looking forward to.
▲Shen Xiaoming
Shen Xiaoming mentioned that 3 kilometers in the sea area of Tai O Bay is the coastal park with the largest coral species in Hong Kong, called Dongpingzhou Marine Park. There, the entire island is surrounded by large expanses of coral reefs, where he dives many times, and is amazed by the coral density and the colorful seabed scene.
In an essay, he described this scene with the strokes of a poet:
"Every year around the time of the small full in May, there is no warning at sea level, and it is not possible to see any difference from usual, below the surface of the sea, a collective carnival of the ocean is brewing, and the branches of the antler coral, the cherry red egg sacs, begin to sprout, like a tree full of peaches ripening; The honeycomb-shaped disc coral, like the tip of the tongue of a young girl who spits out slightly when she is ashamed, also reveals a crimson egg sac. They are all waiting for some mysterious moment, an invisible conductor raises his hand, the racing driver shakes the champagne on the podium, sperm and eggs spew out at the same time, the transparency of the sea water is instantly reduced, although it has been diluted by the sea water, through the diving mirror, I can still smell a faint smell, which is the smell of corals that have flourished for thousands of years..."
In time, such a scene may also appear in the waters of Shenzhen. After all, it's only 3 kilometers apart and it's easy to visit the door.
In time, not only corals, but also more marine life, including large creatures, should come to visit the door and even settle.
Shen Xiaoming said of one thing, the locals told that in the 50s of the last century, a Teochew man named Su Dali in South Australia caught a big fish, "A few thousand pounds, that big fish was fried by Su Dali with a fish cannon, dragged back to the dock, and the whole village ate for several months." ”
Locals call this fish sea loach.
Shen Xiaoming said that regarding sea loach, the "Xin'an County Chronicle, Property and Scales" also recorded: "Sea loach, the big one is dozens of feet long, and the eyes are as big as a basket." Oysters, mussels and snails grow on their backs, and they are like mountains. He further analyzed that only sperm whales or large baleen whales in the sea can grow to more than ten meters long, and the county chronicle says that the shellfish on its head and back are actually barnacles, an arthropod in the sea. There are not many species of whales with long barnacles, but they are no more than right whales, gray whales, and humpback whales. Neither of the first two is found in tropical Chinese waters, so the only possibility that Su Dali killed with a fish cannon was a humpback whale.
This is a record of Shenzhen whaling that was almost abandoned by history.
During the years of living by the sea, Shen Xiaoming experienced two visits to Shenzhen by marine behemoths, one for sperm whales and one for Bruce whales. Sadly, though, he had seen whales twice in the seas of Shenzhen, both times ending with a crane.
Thinking of the interconnectedness of all things, the seabed full of corals is bound to attract a large number of marine life. "Planting corals, planting people's hearts", how to let the future marine life settle in Shenzhen with peace of mind, is a topic that we must think about from now on.
A true ocean city must first create a vibrant "underwater city" - where the forest is dense, and all kinds of large and small marine animals spontaneously form their own communities and streets.
▲ Hong Kong's DongPing Chau Marine Park, which is three kilometers above the sea area of Tai O Bay, is the coastal park with the largest coral species in Hong Kong, and the entire island is surrounded by a large area of coral reefs.
The triangular waters between Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands are known as the "Everest" of marine biodiversity, and some biological experts even believe that this may be the "center of the origin of life".
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