Photo by Todd Richard
Diver Penny Hammer observes fish around brain coral in the Flower Garden Banks
Beyond the white sand beaches and classic vacation vistas of the Gulf of Mexico, most land dwellers have never ventured out far enough to revel in its true magic.
Located just over one hundred miles off the coast of the Louisiana/Texas border, nestled amongst the oil rigs, the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary is a series of robust coral reefs. Coral is not common in the Gulf of Mexico, but the combination of ancient salt domes and warm Mexican waters have perfectly formed some of the healthiest reefs on the planet.
More than half of the coral reefs around the world have disappeared or declined in the past half century due to overfishing, climate change, and pollution. The Flower Garden Banks became a marine sanctuary in 1992 when Louisiana and Texas legislators joined forces in enforcing preservation. Now the reefs and their inhabitants are protected in the same manner as a national park, forming a bustling underwater metropolis.
The Flower Garden Banks boasts a trifecta rarely witnessed underwater these days: critters, coral, and clarity.
“It’s hard to get that combination in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Todd Richard, whose infatuation with the Flower Garden Banks inspired him to create the documentary Window in the Waves. Richard is a Baton Rouge native who works as a photographer for Synergy Productions, a production company with a sector specializing in underwater footage. He began scuba diving more than twenty years ago. Richard said he first heard about the Flower Garden Banks in the mid-1990s when some fellow divers gushed about its beauty. He had to see for himself.
The film was a decade in the making. Richard grew more enamored with each dive trip to the Banks, and he decided to make a documentary in the early 2000s. But Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, followed by the BP oil spill, deterred progress. Richard and his crew started “hitting it hard” in late 2011, and Window began coming to life.
It took more than a dozen trips and between 150 and two hundred dives to gather all the footage for the documentary, according to Richard. The gulf has its own set of seasons that each bring distinctive sea fauna, or as Richard endearingly referred to them, “critters.” “Various critters visit at different times, and you never know what’s going to happen,” he said.
“You never know what you’re going to see. It’s a surprise.”
Spring brings hammerhead sharks and eagle rays, and summer is the season of manta rays and whale sharks. Window highlights the curious nature of these creatures, showing a few of them swimming right up to the camera.
“Any time you interact with manta rays, that’s cool,” Richard said. “They seem to have a personality. They’ll look at you, swim around you, do loops in front of you…They’re interested in you.”
Richard cheerily recalled the loggerhead turtle who kept bumping into his camera lens and the puffer fish who gave him a manicure by gnawing on his fingernails.
The most beautiful phenomenon Richard said he captured on film, though, happens seven to ten days after every August full moon. Like clockwork, the coral begin spawning, releasing their sperm and eggs into the water. This external fertilization creates an underwater blizzard of future generations that is a spectacle of nature.
The majestic coral reefs and their fishy ecosystem are a mainstay, though. The Banks are home to some of the healthiest coral reefs in the world, with more than three hundred species of fish and twenty-three types of coral. It maintains a delicate balance that has become increasingly uncommon in other reefs as time has passed.
Although the Gulf of Mexico is polluted because it drains the Mississippi River, the remoteness of the Banks protects the sanctuary by diluting the runoff into practical insignificance. Renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle describes the reefs as a “window in time” in the film because the sanctuary looks like the ocean did before climate change and pollution took their toll.
Richard uses stunning underwater cinematography to capture the obscure beauty of the Flower Garden Banks and bring it to those who didn’t know it existed.
“It’s not frequented by a lot of human beings,” he said of the Banks. “It’s kind of cool, sharing something really neat that most people will never see.”
Details. Details. Details.
Premieres on LPB Thursday, March 20, 2014 at 7 pm in Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Shreveport, Alexandria, Lake Charles, and Monroe: re-airs 9:30 pm on Friday.
Airs on WLAE in New Orleans on Friday, April 11 at 8:30 pm.
View the trailer at vimeo.com/86151289. And watch the special online at lpb.org/waves.
