Big Blue, Tall Green - Conversations On Coral Reefs And Tropical Forests

Migrants to the Andaman Islands, Chetana Purushotham and Krishna Anujan find themselves enamoured by the deep, lush wilderness of these islands and the water that surrounds them. Respectively a marine ecologist and tropical biologist, they banter on the incorruptible link between life underwater and on land.

- Chetana Purushotham & Krishna Anujan

On a jagged mossy rock, a Pacific Reef Egret leans forward, motionless. As though admiring its own reflection. A wave breaks against the rock, sending salt spray and fish towards the patient hunter. Snap! Fish make their way into the hungry predator’s mouth.

Binoculars down. Pan out. Two plainclothes researchers (GK and Chutney) jump out from behind a fallen bulletwood tree onto a south Andaman Island beach.

GK: Whoa! Did that egret just catch a fish out of the sea? I thought they stick around forests and fields in the company of deer and cows.

Chutney: True… but here we are where forest and sea meet. So, when I’m not diving, I go birding.

GK: I don’t know, I like birding here, but shore birds are confusing. And frankly I know nothing about the sea.

Chutney: Learn to dive. It’s a different world underwater. Corals are ‘rainforests of the sea’.

GK: Are you serious?

Chutney: I am. Plants and animals exhibit similar adaptations even in the marine world. Safety in numbers, colour means poison, symbiosis!

LIFE IN SEAWATER

By now, you must be familiar with living in and breathing the nitrogen-oxygen mixture that we call air. Life in the sea is different. To start with, it is salty and continually in motion. If the currents don’t take you from one ocean basin to another, the tides will see-saw you, roughly every six hours, to land and back.