While Kenting’s popular beaches are shaped by the seasonal cycle of human activity, it is the ocean current here that creates and sustains the diversity of life beneath the waters offshore. Coral reef spawns and land crab egg releases are quirkily curious events that occur just once a year under moonlit spring nights. The uniquely rich and diverse coral ecosystems that thrive in the waters off Taiwan’s southernmost peninsula offer a rare window on our planet’s world beneath the waves.
The coral reefs off the Hengchun Peninsula have been a magnet for marine ecologists for nearly forty years as well as a major proving ground for domestic marine-related research and survey work. However, since the 1990s, rising tourist numbers and intrusive construction projects have increasingly disrupted the natural order. Now, nearly every heavy rainstorm and passing typhoon sweeps fragile soils, vegetation, and garbage from the land to be dumped unceremoniously into Hengchun’s coastal waters, burying coral reefs under another stifling layer of debris.
The Hengchun Coast is also experiencing the effects of both global climate change and the El Niño cycle. Four coral bleaching events since 1998 have devasted area reefs, and large swathes of the most temperature-sensitive corals are already gone. This documentary follows marine ecologist Chang-feng Dai and dive master Yung-chun Tsai to explore the effects on the peninsula’s corals, reef and migratory fish, and marine invertebrates and highlights the grassroots efforts being made by local residents to ameliorate the damage of this continuing ecological onslaught.
For forty years, the waters off Taiwan’s Hengchun Peninsula have been a source both boundless pleasure and anxious concern. Our imagined dialogue with the myriad of life that make their home here may best be summed up in a question: “When will this coast finally be allowed to rest and recover?” The past four decades have given so much. Shouldn’t we all be doing more in return?