Be The Champ! – Cuba

Healthy, thriving corals are a key characteristic of these reefs, packed in with a density that you rarely see in the Caribbean. The reason is that Caribbean reefs changed forever in the early 1980s, when almost all of the dominant reef-building branching corals were wiped out by disease (that scientists later discovered originated from human sewage).

Coral cover on Caribbean reefs before 1980 was around 50%, and since then has been stuck at 20%. In short, corals died and seaweeds took over. Seaweeds got their chance because the vegetarian fish that should have been there to mow them down were already fished out.

And the dominance of seaweeds has stopped the corals from recovering.

The Jardines are one of the few places that buck this trend. The shallows have dense forests of branching elkhorn coral, packed with grunts.

An early lesson for any ecology student is that there are always fewer predators than prey. There are more rabbits than foxes, more zebras than lions.

Unusually, coral reefs can buck this trend and can be home to a greater weight of large predators than small fish.

This is possible because the small fish replenish their numbers quickly, so the mass of them at any moment is much less than the mass added up over a year, and also because the bigger predators, being cold-blooded, need to eat far less than a similar-sized mammal or bird.

Sadly, we don’t see this pattern on most reefs because of fishing, which culls the large, long-lived predators and leaves small fish to dominate.

But Cuba, like Palau, is one of the places where the big fish are still present in impressive numbers.

In the Jardines, each dive-site has multiple large, friendly groupers, including characterful Nassau, mean-looking black groupers and ginormous Goliath groupers.

For me, grouper are all about faces, the personality that comes through from their large eyes and botoxed lips. And the friendlier the fish, the better we will be able to capture this character.

Thankfully the Jardines has plentiful inquisitive groupers, but to get the best encounters we still need to be as quiet as possible in the water.

The best technique is close-focus wide angle, and we should set up our strobes tight to the housing before we move in, to avoid unnecessary flapping around that will spook even friendly souls.

Then we just have to wait for that moment of peak eye contact or, if we’re really lucky, a yawn.

The forgotten stars of Cuba’s reefs are the macro subjects. Although many photographers think of this place as a wide-angle destination, these rich reefs are great for macro too.

Furthermore, since most macro photography is done in South-east Asia, Caribbean reefs offer plenty of rarely photographed subjects. My favourites are some of the common reef fish, especially the spectacularly coloured purple and yellow fairy basslet and its rare cousin, the almost entirely yellow golden basslet.

Sharks also thrive on these reefs and are permanently popular photographic subjects. On the shallow reefs, butch Caribbean reef sharks dominate, while silky sharks, big and small, can be encountered at the surface above the deeper sites.

I’ve shot Caribbean reef sharks in many places, not least the Bahamas, so in Cuba I’d recommend focusing less on portraits of this species and instead using them within beautiful reef scenic shots.

I start by watching for their typical route, and then plan a shot around a pretty section of the reef in their path.