J. Emmett Duffy, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine
Science and the College of William and Mary, writes from the
coral reefs of Belize, where he is studying sponge-dwelling
snapping shrimps. Sunday, July 8 As the sun breaks the horizon,
I sit in a wooden chair at the edge of the backreef, an eye on
the weather horizon, gratefully sipping the first strong coffee
and gauging what the day has in store. Soothed by the fresh
breeze and the muffled thud of the surf on the reef, half-
watching a lone frigate bird high overhead and a hermit crab
lumbering past my bare foot through a miniature jungle of beach
vines and flotsam, it feels like home. It’s my 14th trip to this
speck of land at the ocean’s edge, and this has been my morning
ritual for years, a rare quiet spot in the tumbling stream of
modern life to let the mind unreel and reflect. We are now fully
shifted into Plan B mode. The social shrimps that we came
searching for, that have dominated these reefs for at least 20
years, are gone. Scrambling