Black Forest

Black Forest is one of Grand Cayman's most celebrated dive sites, an area of the island's west wall where extraordinary concentrations of black coral trees create an underwater landscape of almost theatrical beauty — dense stands of the dark-branched coral extending from the wall face in formations that in reduced visibility resemble the bare, skeletal trees of a forest in winter, hence the site's evocative name. Black coral is protected throughout the Cayman Islands, and the density of growth at this site reflects the long-term protection that has allowed these slow-growing organisms to develop to their current impressive sizes. Black coral — Antipatharia — is not actually black in life; the living organism is typically brown, olive, or yellow, depending on species and light conditions, with the characteristic black skeleton visible only when the tissue is removed. The colour of the skeleton, produced by a unique proteinaceous compound, has made black coral commercially valuable for jewellery, driving exploitation elsewhere in the Caribbean. Grand Cayman's protection has preserved the Black Forest site as one of the finest examples of intact black coral habitat in the western Atlantic. The marine life associated with the black coral forest is remarkably rich. The complex three-dimensional structure of the branching corals provides attachment points and shelter for a diverse community of associated organisms: various small fish species that live specifically within black coral branches, invertebrates that use the colony structure for cover, and the larger fish that congregate around the forest to exploit the food resources it concentrates. Snapper aggregate in the shadowed spaces between larger colonies. Moray eels wind through the branches. And the visual effect of a school of fish seen through a lattice of black coral branches creates one of Grand Cayman diving's most distinctive photographic compositions. For intermediate divers on Grand Cayman, Black Forest is a site that captures the island's diving heritage — the historical protection that created this forest, the iconic status it has developed in Caribbean dive culture, and the ongoing reality of encountering it on every dive in its apparently unchanged and continuously impressive state.