Studying Bahama's reefs, just like his father

Gordon Chaplin felt as though he had come home.

There in the library of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University - notwithstanding the stern, Victorian visages staring down from the walls - he was surrounded by the stuff of his childhood memories.

Fish collected by Chaplin and his father, Charles, from whom he would grow so distant, floated in specimen jars. Drawings from the seminal book of Bahamian fishes written by the elder Chaplin and former Academy curator James Böhlke were on display. A film of Bahama reefs, in their former glory, flickered across a screen.

As Gordy, the boy, snorkeled by in the movie, Gordon, the man - 68, his rugged features topped by a swirl of gray hair - told an audience at a lecture last week, "This started 60 to 70 years ago with my father's work. After years of wandering in the wilderness, I find myself back here, carrying it on."

Serendipity runs through the story of what is now the largest collection of Bahamian fish in any museum in the world - 61,246 specimens.

Although the Academy had some earlier Bahamian fish, dating from the late 19th century, its collection expanded greatly starting in the 1950s.

British adventurer Charles Chaplin and his wife, Philadelphia heiress Louise Catherwood, were living on what is now Paradise Island, in Nassau. He began collecting fish and worked for years with Böhlke to amass a large trove, including many previously unnamed species.

A couple of developments aided them. One was SCUBA, recently invented. They also used a new method to gather fish: dousing portions of a reef with rotenone, an insecticide that would kill the fish, but nothing else.

The two later wrote Fishes of the Bahamas and Adjacent Tropical Waters.

"He remade himself from a consort of wealthy women into a respected scientist," Gordon Chaplin said of his father, who eventually became a trustee of the Academy.

One day, the father introduced his young son to the underwater world.

"As if I'd passed through the looking glass like Alice, I was suddenly inside our living room aquarium with its colony of bright, tiny sea creatures," he writes in a new book, Full Fathom Five, part memoir, part science tome.

The phrase is borrowed from Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Full fathom five, thy father lies; of his bones are corals made . . . ."

Chaplin, who lives in New York, recalled "coral gardens out of a fairy tale. There was water clear as air. All we had to do was dive below the surface, and it was ours."

He grew up and went his own way, becoming a journalist and author. He suffered tragedy and bounced back. He and his family became distant; he refers to himself now as "the prodigal son."

In 2003, a dozen years after his father died, he got a phone call from Dominique Didier Dagit, then associate curator of fishes at the Academy. Would he be part of a retrospective study of the Nassau reefs, she asked.

Scientists wanted to retrace his father's collecting forays in the Bahamas, with him guiding the way.

Chaplin's hand cramped around the phone.

"It was too good to be true - returning to your childhood with scientists carrying the bags," he said in a recent NPR interview.

Revisiting the Bahamas was emotionally tumultuous. The research required five expeditions over seven years. But the scientists found four of the original reefs, and others that were comparable.

All were dying.

They dived the reefs and collected fish. In 2011, their findings were published in the Bulletin of Marine Science.

Although the diversity of fish had remained the same, which was a bit of good news, their relative abundance had not.

Herbivores - fish that thrive on algae growing on a failing reef - had increased dramatically. Planktivores - fish that eat small invertebrates on a healthy reef - had declined.

The study gave insight into the fate of fish on dying reefs, a tragedy spreading worldwide. It was also a testament to the value of natural-history collections, which allow comparisons between "what was happening in the past to what is happening now," said Robert Robins, an ichthyology collections manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History who is familiar with the work.

Katriina L. Ives, lead author and an Academy scientist now at the Royal Ontario Museum of Natural History, isn't prepared to put all the blame on climate change. A combination of factors, including development and runoff, are likely at play, she said.

Chaplin, though, contends the culprit is climate change.

"As to my father's legacy, the ocean and its inhabitants past and present, this newly minted activist wishes he could do something earthshaking to help preserve it," Chaplin writes in Full Fathom Five.

There is hope, he asserted. "This is my calling. The Bahamas."

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