Palau, An Island Eden Overview

As Earth is an oasis of life in infinite space, so the islands of Palau form a living Eden surrounded by a desert of ocean. Palau, a cluster of green islands, is surrounded by sparkling blue ocean. Though it covers almost three-fourths of the planet, the ocean is mostly a vast, empty wasteland, devoid of life. But this archipelago of 343 islands radiates a diversity of marine life throughout much of the tropical Pacific. Truly, Palau is an Eden of lush oceanic abundance.

The southern reaches of the archipelago are where Palau's most characteristic geological features rise in strange formations. These are the Rock Islands: verdant, small, undercut isles that resemble green mushrooms. So unusual are the Rock Islands that their origins enter the realm of magic and myth. Scattered across the sea, these uprisings are described in Palauan legend as the protruding remains of a gargantuan woman who, through her insatiable and selfish appetite, exploded, creating these unique formations. A rock island, shaped like an hourglass, balances precariously, apparently ready to topple. These limestone islands bear the marks of erosion and the elements.

The Other Worlds of Palau

We are caught in a powerful moment as cosmic patterns and the earth adjust -- tides rise or fall, weather systems lose or gain heat, the sun surrenders another day to the moon's night. Life on Palau takes its most important cues from these insistent pulls of interstellar power. Underwater, millions of tiny creatures swim. Small drifters in a barely known ecosystem compose the brew of oceanic life, plankton. Plankton masses reveal rainbowed ctenophores, like spaceships signaling with colors, tiny fish, wiggling worm-like swimmers. A baby octopus pulses, trying to move in the current, a fragile, transparent piece of life which will develop into the most intelligent of all the spineless creatures in the sea.

Fading light, deeper in the water, reveals shapes and forms of strange configuration in an unusual landscape. Suddenly, the coral reef is illuminated; this is the Palauan oasis in an oceanic desert, an explosion of life in an otherwise empty world where open water prevails and only a transient glistening of whale or fish pass through. Soft corals in reds and oranges sway next to enormous pink sea fans. Yellow sponges rise like a cluster of tiny skyscrapers. Green and blue parrotfish swim in the reef, painted like circus performers.

Deep in the ocean fiery red cracks illuminate an undersea volcanic eruption. Pillow lava billows and flows in exploding advances, graphically demonstrating the violent volcanic process that has created this Pacific mountain range, the tops of which are the verdant islands of Palau. This is how land is born in the depths of the sea.

The Miraculous Reef

Among the branches of staghorn coral, with branches reaching upwards toward the sunlight, plankton swirl and squirm in the quickly moving current. The coral planula, the size of a hyphen, turns and settles on a surface as did primordial coral on newly risen volcanic surfaces. The coral polyp precipitates calcium carbonate from sea water and builds a castle wall around itself. In time it will bud, cloning itself into identical reef builders, all of which then build their own structures.

The secret to the reef building coral's success is that living inside its tissues are tiny, single-celled plants called zooxanthellae, which provide food for the coral. By day, the plants bathe in sunlight, providing food for the coral animal. By night, the animal polyp expands from its case and tiny tentacles prey on food drifting by in the current. This partnership is perhaps the first and most ancient ecosystem. This small patch of coral polyps begins the miracle of life on the coral reef, where a tiny animal creates the largest structures on earth, the only unnatural features visible from space.

Not only does the reef provide housing for the mobile creatures of the sea, it is also the basis of a vast food web. The coral structure itself is a meal, an underwater gingerbread house, the edible apartment building. The parrotfish is one animal that grazes upon the coral reef. In order to eat the coral's plants, it has developed a strong beak to break the coral's case. To get the plants, it must devour the masonry. As they feed on the reef they excrete a trail of sand, having digested the embedded plants. A single parrotfish may produce a ton of coral sand a year. The reef is in a constant cycle of creation and destruction, achieving an evolutionary balance.

Creatures living in the reef must be clever to survive. Brightly festooned lionfish stalk small wrasse and gulp them down. Garden eels rise out of the sandy bottom like bean stalks then bob and weave to catch tiny morsels in the current. Goatfish feed in the sand and butterfly fish graze on algae. Large fish snap up smaller fish. Sharks patrol the outer edges of schools of silversides. Even young barracuda bunch up in protective schools. This is the banquet of the underwater world.

From a small hole in the reef a tiny octopus emerges. Grown from its larval stage, the juvenile octopus is small and vulnerable and can only forage for seconds at a time. Furtively, it jets back into hiding. Nearby on the reef, an adult octopus moves like liquid mercury, changing colors in a flashing display of camouflage. It stops, surveys, and then leaps, in octopus fashion, on a coral head, enveloping it under the extended web of its eight arms and feeling underneath for prey. Still vulnerable, even as an adult, the octopus quickly returns to its den.

The Beating of the Heart of Palau

The islands of Palau are actually ancient coral reefs that have been uplifted. They are porous, full of holes and passages, where water surges and flows, driven by the sun's currents and the moon's tides. Underwater passages crisscross the rock islands and may lead to underwater collapsed caverns. Through such passages, or siphons, water pumps as in a complicated circulatory system, where sea water fills caverns and spills into inland lakes, driven by pulsed celestial rhythms like a galactic heartbeat. These siphons can also lead to the mangrove roots near Jellyfish Lake, an inner island marine lake surrounded by trees. Waters here are dyed tan from leaching through the leaves. This archipelago has many such saltwater lakes created by the seepage of seawater through passages and siphons. Jellyfish Lake is unique among the rare, only one life form dominates and it is otherworldly. Here a small species of jellyfish has drifted in during its larval stage and flourished. The jellyfish move from the shore toward the lake's center. These small creatures form a constellation of life where invisible forces push and pull in a dance of moon, sun, tide and jellyfish. It is a unique celestial arrangement.

Features of these particular jellyfish include its eyeless bell, dangling tentacles, but most importantly, the green-brown coloration in its tissue. This is because it has small plants, similar to the zooxanthellae found in the coral tissue, growing inside. These jellyfish are also subjects of the sun, following a daily cycle which brings them to the surface to bask in sunshine while their plant parts thrive, then descending at night into noxious depths where anaerobic conditions offer up a nearly toxic brew of nutrients. Here in Jellyfish Lake, these strange animals, 90 percent water themselves, are trapped by the unique geology of Palau.

Mangroves and Mudskippers

The roots of the mangrove trees extend like fingers, actually holding on to the land in such a way that it is not swept to sea. Where mangroves exist, the land holds. Where they do not, erosion eats away at the island. On the sandy beach next to the mangrove, which is partially created thanks to the mangrove's holding power, a drama of Lilliputian dimension unfolds. Tiny fiddler crabs with enormous claws pop out of tiny holes and wave, or fiddle, their claws to attract a mate and to scare off competitors. They pop up and down, scurry, eat, spit out perfectly round pellets, and close their sand trap doors behind them. One such tiny armored tank scratches its way back toward the mangrove roots. Perched on a root, a mudskipper looks around with frog-like, periscopic eyes. It evokes scenes imagined from a dimmer age, when evolution, in halting moves, stepped from the sea onto shore. Looking like a time traveler, an evolutionary snapshot, the mudskipper also bridges land and sea. Several skitter nearby, skimming across the water, more like birds than fish. Others walk through the mud, using their pectoral fins like primitive legs and dragging their bodies behind. One snaps at a crab and gulps it down. Two meet and raise their dorsal fins, looking like Chinese junks doing battle. Another rolls in the mud to dislodge a mosquito.

The Jungle Eden

In the canopy of a thick island jungle, the sun reigns. Bathed in sunshine, a thick jungle grows. In the treetops, hanging dark and still, a fruit bat arranges its cloak of wings around itself and gazes at us with large, dark eyes. The bat reveals its two babies clinging to its stomach and then hidden again by its wings. Maligned by fiction more than fact, these bats eat only fruit.

Moving ever more intimately into the jungle canopy, there are hidden creatures tucked into small places -- spiders, beetles, preying mantis. The secretive Palauan dove sits quietly, feathered in its beautiful colors. Its gentle cooing, a sound which is explained by myth as a mourning call in response to fishermen bringing a clam back from the sea. Everywhere here the land and sea, the sun and moon, the people and the reef are interwoven. In this island Eden, there is a complex relationship between a village and its environs. Here each turn in the reef, each outcropping of a rock, or each fruiting tree is given a name. With such ownership of place comes a strong conservation ethic.

The Disappearing Islands

The rustle of branches signals increasing wind; leaves begin to slap and move. Dark clouds move across the sky and we are about to experience another effect of the sun -- the weather system that swirls powerfully across vast ocean distances. When monsoon season arrives in paradise, the effect is dramatic. At the edge of the island, waves break over the reef and the wind whips whitecaps. In the jungle, heavy rain pours, bending large leaves which release their puddles of collected water. Water drips out of the limestone stem of the rock island: a sponge, releasing its collection of water to the sea. This rainfall has percolated through leaves and humus, picking up acidity which accelerates the erosion of the island's structure. At water level, the undercutting nature of the sea's erosion is evident. It is easy to see how the combined erosive effects of sea, rain and acidity will one day topple many of these rock gardens. At sea level, sea urchins and limpets are embedded into the rock, slowly grating algae in a minute but constant process, adding to the erosion.

Keepers of Edens and Clams

The source of all diversity of life in the sea is from the mythic explosion of a giant clam. Fishing is an important way of Palauan life. Some people keep clam farms. What appears to be a Zen garden of huge rocks, on closer inspection, is something else altogether; these rocks are adorned with a rippling surface of vibrant color -- the mantles of the giant tridacna clam. Children swim in the middle of a clam farm which is tended by Palauan "keepers of Eden." One small girl dives down to a clam and touches its mantle. The clam jerks, pulls in its mantle, jerks again and then slowly closes, leaving a six-inch gap--far too wide to ever entrap a foot or hand, dispelling its reputation as the man-eating clam. Within the clam's exquisitely colored mantle, tiny patches of green algae serve as internal gardens and contribute to the clam's enormous growth, much as happens in the coral and jellyfish. A sudden shudder, and the clam spouts a plume from its siphon, spawning future generations.

Alien City

At the reef, an octopus forages, spreading its eight arms to form a living umbrella as it covers a coral head. This master of change is the first of many reef residents that is encountered as an alien city is entered. This city is complete with architecture, schedules and characters. The octopus glides along the reef, changing colors and textures in true magician form. The coral garden is the ancient partnership of coral and plant joined together to build this underwater metropolis. The coral city is alive and its characters and residents emerge. Doctors of the reef are at work -- tiny cleaning fish roam over the bodies of groupers at a "cleaning station," removing and eating parasites and bits of skin, keeping their "patients" healthier and receiving immunity from predation in the process. Garbage collectors and sanitary engineers labor away: sea cucumbers forage on the sea floor, devouring sand and purifying it in the process; sponges filter material from the water, cleaning it. There are even fashion plates on the reef -- lionfish, plumed and colorful, posture and then lunge to devour small fish. Colorful sea snails without shells, in a variety of patterns, create a montage of unexpected variety. Shoppers are busy --decorator crabs snip pieces of sponge, algae and shells and carefully apply them to their backs in a stylish act of camouflage, having "shopped" for their protection.

Tricksters and cheats also inhabit the reef -- fish with false eye spots to confuse predators; fish with apparently no faces, being masked in dark color to confuse; a cleaner mimic, looking like a cleaner fish, hangs out on the periphery of a cleaning station, approaches a fish expecting to be serviced, and then takes a bite instead. In some places on the reef, mobsters reign as schools of fish overpower a damselfish nest and devour its eggs. Sharks patrol the edges of the reef and then attack. Bodyguards hold their positions below as aggressive but small clownfish nestle into the tentacles of an anemone and not only receive its protection but also protect it from invaders.

Gobie fish and blind shrimp share a single burrow in the role of the odd couple of the reef, each helping the other. And they're are the invisibles of the city, those who find advantage in cloaking themselves with deceptive camouflage--stonefish, flatfish, crocodile fish, and another octopus. Treasure hunters comb the sandy bottom in the form of goatfish that extend their chin "whiskers" and probe in the sand for tidbits. The coral reef itself is not immune: an invading crown-of-thorns starfish, adorned with many large, pointed spikes, moves across a coral head, digesting live coral polyps and leaving a trail of white coral skeleton in its wake.

Celebration of Life

The cosmic dance changes step as the sun begins to set. The sky glows with mauves, pinks, and reds. As with many natural phenomenon there is a Palauan myth of the setting sun: before descending below the horizon, the sun passes by an orange tree, collects a few oranges and then throws them into the sea before entering, in order to scare away the sharks.

As darkness settles on the reef, so does a stillness. Fish seek niches in the reef to rest. In the barely illuminated darkness, parrotfish slumber, eyes open in their "sleeping bag," a mucus coating it has secreted to disguise their scent. The goatfish has changed colors, put on its "pajamas" for nighttime on the reef. From underneath a reef ledge, a basketstar climbs to the top and unfurls its tangled arms.

Even at night, a full moon illuminates the reef. The most enchanting magic happens at night. In each coral castle, there is a round balloon: the coral egg packets. As the balloons are released in rapid succession, egg packets rise, and the water is filled with pink spheres. This is the brief moment of coral spawning and drifting to new regions, when the sea is filled with the possibility of distant coral reefs, of more island Edens.

The sunrises above the reef and a new day begins as the sun's rays again penetrate clear water. At the surface, the sea explodes in a feeding frenzy with fish jumping, birds diving, sharks circling below. Manta rays soar and plunge and sharks hunt effortlessly. Fishermen prepare nets from their boats. This Eden -- Palau - is where the smallest creatures have the greatest effect; where the most distant forces, the sun and moon, have the closest influence; and where life is bound with the vitality of the planet in abundance and beauty.

Palau is home to some of the most exotic creatures and realms in the world. From coral reefs to sea cucumbers, these are the highlights of this enchanted isle.

Coral reefs, composed of small animals called coral polyps, are an integral part of marine life. Only the upper layer of the coral reef is made up of living corals. While more than 600 species of coral exist, there are two main types of coral: soft and hard (stony) coral. Stony corals get their structure by taking calcium from the saltwater, which helps to create their hard outer shell. The stony coral only extends its polyps, while the soft coral's whole body swells. Polyps emerge when the coral is feeding. Some eat in the daytime, though others are nocturnal. Many coral reefs depend upon the sunlight to live, because most coral live on internal algae. Other animals live on this algae as well, and also rely on the coral's polyps, to survive. This makes most coral reefs vulnerable. For example, starfish eat the algae and polyps from the coral. A starfish can eat their own mass in coral in a single day. Other fish make the coral reef their home, either for themselves or for their offspring.

Palau reefs are hosts to over 300 species of coral, nine species of sea grass, and 2,000 species of fish. Each member of this ecosystem depends the others to survive. When one piece of the link is removed, all other living things suffer. For example, in the mid-1980s, fishermen caught many parrot fish near Cook Island. The parrot fish are an integral part of the coral reef ecosystem because they eat the excess algae, which allows the coral to survive. The result was that algae growth soon overtook the coral and killed it. Some of the animals which live in this ecosystem are highlighted below. For further references, please see the Related Resources page.

The sea cucumber is an important animal to the islands of Palau. Many ecological systems depend upon it as a food resource. The sea cucumber's eggs are a primary food source for many other sea creatures. A relative of the starfish, sea cucumbers are also invertebrates with soft bodies. The Palauan people use the sea cucumber to protect their feet when walking in the reef. They squeeze the sea cucumber until it squirts out sticky threads, which they put on their feet. Even though this practice may sound harsh, the sea cucumber returns to the reef unharmed. These threads are normally used by the sea cucumber to trap its enemies.

Cuttlefish average 30 cm long and live for only about 18 months. They are nocturnal animals that feed at night using tentacles, and keep hidden during the day. Cuttlefish eat small fish, crab and shrimp. The cuttlefish is also chameleon-like because they too can change colors to match their surroundings and hide from predators.

A nocturnal predator which has developed a keen sense of smell due to poor eyesight, the moray eel feeds on damsel fish and cardinal fish hiding within the coral reefs. The octopus is another victim of the moray eel. Both of these creatures enjoy similar living spaces, so the eel will attack when it finds an octopus. The moray eel can reach 10 feet in length and weigh up to 75 pounds. They are also camouflaged inside and out; moray eels keep their mouths open in order to gather water to breathe.

Over 350 different types of sharks live all over the world and almost all tropical species of sharks are found in Palau. Species most often seen in Palau are gray reef sharks, blacktips and whitetips. Sharks are cold-blooded fish and have a skeleton that is made of cartilage. One indicator of the species type is the sharks' teeth. Their teeth are species specific because each species has adapted to a particular diet. Some sharks eat only one kind of animal while others are not as choosy. Most sharks are nocturnal. Seeing schools of sharks around Palau is rare, but should always be treated with caution.

These reef fish eat algae that cover the coral reef. The parrotfish has large teeth which are fused together to help the parrot fish eat hard coral. Parrotfish can change color to match the surroundings and hide from predators. They also have a very strong odor which needs to be covered up at night when they are most vulnerable. To combat this the parrotfish seals itself in a cocoon. Parrotfish are very unique animals because they can be born female and become male later in their lifetime.

Jellyfish are over 95 percent water and do not have gills, a heart, blood or a brain. Even though their organs are limited, they still retain the sense of taste and smell. Jellyfish cannot see objects, but can sense the difference between dark and light areas. The body of the jellyfish is called the bell, in reference to its shape. Many jellyfish also have stinging tentacles which can span over 100 feet in length. These tentacles are used to sting and capture prey. Jellyfish feed mainly on small animals called zooplankton. For more information on jellyfish please see the Jellyfish Lake page.

There are over 800 types of these "wind-flowers," which vary in size from a half inch to 10 inches tall. Relatives of the sea anemone include coral and jellyfish. Like jellyfish, the sea anemone has stinging cells on its tentacles. This is how the sea anemone catches its prey and defends itself from enemies.

There are more than 80 saltwater lakes in Palau. These lakes of Palau are one of the most fascinating features of the island. Each lake has its own unique ecosystem, similar to the reefs, but very different in their own respects. The saltwater lakes were formed through a process of erosion in the limestone islands. Water erosion created holes in the limestone, which the saltwater seeped through to form the lakes. Some lakes have a good mixture of rainwater and saltwater, while in others there is less current flow. In these lakes the rainwater is lighter than the saltwater and rests on top, forming two distinct layers. This type of lake is called an estuary. Many lakes do not have any predators in them and the animals have adapted to this. Many do not have the same defense mechanisms that would be found on the same species in the ocean. The simplest ecosystem can be found in Spooky Lake. In Spooky Lake there are only two species of animals, copepods and algae. Since there are no predators to feed on the copepods in this ecosystem, this lake remains fairly peaceful. Another lake is called Hot Water lake, named for the characteristics of its water. On the surface the water is about 85 degrees Fahrenheit and only fifteen feet below the water surface it can reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The largest lake in Palau is called the Metukercheuas Uet lake. This oxygen rich lake measures over a mile and a half long and 200 feet deep.

Millions of years ago, jellyfish were trapped in this lake after a submerged reef rose from the sea, creating a landlocked saltwater lake. In this lake, the jellyfish have adapted to the new conditions by losing their sting. They have eight primitive eyes and algae that live within their cells. These algae are what the jellyfish live on. Twice each day, the jellyfish in the lake swim from one side to the other. The jellyfish do this to get sunlight to their internal algae so that the algae can grow. At night the jellyfish swim to a lower depth where the water is rich in nitrogen. The nitrogen also sustains the algae population. The jellyfish has only one main predator in this lake -- the sea anemone. Jellyfish can be stung, trapped, and killed by these creatures.