The Shifting Earth - The Darwinian Tourist - page 83

The morning of February 8, 2008, dawned without noticeable fanfare on Yap
Island. This tiny speck of land in the mid-Pacifi c Ocean is part of a scattering
of islands, spread over an area the size of the continental United States, that
makes up the newly independent nation of Micronesia.
I greeted the day with cheerful anticipation, as I invariably do when I am
about to plunge into a tropical sea. But I did not anticipate that before the day
was done I would have a personal encounter with the immense forces that
have built mighty stretches of mountains, opened up gigantic canyons in the
ocean fl oor, and moved islands and continents around from one end of the
Earth to the other.
Yap is famous for the enormous crudely shaped stone disks, each with
a hole in its center, that serve as signatures of wealth for the Yapese people. 1
The disks, accumulated and arranged in rows near each village meeting
house, serve as money. They are surely the clumsiest means of commerce
ever invented. I cannot image how one makes change for a stone disk four
meters in diameter!
American dollars are the preferred currency on the island at the moment,
but the disks still play a role in ceremonial exchanges between villages. The
more of them that a village possesses, the greater its prestige. The stones are
not local—all of them were quarried from quartz-bearing limestone on the
island of Babeldaob, some 200 kilometers to the southwest. Each disk has a
value in part determined by the number of people who died bringing it by
canoe across the open ocean to Yap.
Yap is also famous among scuba divers for its manta ray cleaning sta-
tions. These are sites on the surrounding reef where giant manta rays line up,
like cars at a service station, to be cleaned of parasites by busy wrasses and
other small fi sh.
For several days I had been trying to get some good pictures of this behav-
ior, but had been frustrated by cloudy water. This was the last day I could dive
on the island—I was fl ying out the next evening, and I had to leave a gap of 24
hours between my last dive and the airplane fl ight in order to clear any extra
nitrogen from my body.