Our Imperiled Oceans: Victory at Sea
The world's largest protected area, established this year in the remote Pacific, points the way to restoring marine ecosystems
Christopher Pala
Smithsonian magazine
09/01/2008
At first sight, the people of Kiribati, a nation of tiny islands in the central Pacific, would not appear to be model conservationists. Trash is abundant all along Tarawa, the capital island, a skinny atoll shaped like a backward L and crammed with 40,000 people. (It was the site of one of the costliest landings in World War II, in which 1,000 U.S. marines were killed.) The rustic charm of the traditional thatched houses, which have raised platform floors and no walls, is offset by the smell of human waste wafting from the beaches. The groundwater is contaminated. Infant mortality is high, life expectancy low. And yet this past January impoverished Kiribati established the world's largest protected area, a marine reserve the size of California.
It surrounds the Phoenix Islands, a remote, largely unpopulated archipelago 1,000 miles east of Tarawa. The 158,000-square-mile Phoenix Islands Protected Area, covering about 12 percent of Kiribati's watery domain, holds some of the world's most pristine coral reefs as well as a great abundance and diversity of tropical marine life. And it's the first reserve to place such a large area of open ocean off-limits to commercial fishing. The reserve is one of the planet's ecological bright spots, the boldest, most dramatic effort to save the oceans' coral reefs, the richest habitat in the seas. No wonder the I-Kiribati (pronounced ee-kiri-bahs, which is what the people call themselves; the country is pronounced kiri-bahs) want to showcase the reserve as a uniquely un- spoiled center for marine science, recreational diving and eco-tourism.
Though coral reefs cover less than half a percent of the oceans' area, they host more than 25 percent of its fish species. The first worldwide assessment of coral reefs, released this summer, showed that a third face extinction due to climate change, disease, pollution and overfishing. Australia has outlawed fishing along a third of the Great Barrier Reef to stem the decline of fish stocks there. Palau, a prime scuba-diving destination in the western Pacific, has created a series of no-take areas to protect its healthiest reefs, which amount to a third of its coastline. Other Pacific island governments agreed to do the same, in what they dubbed the "Micronesia Challenge." The Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Jamaica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, all of whose waters are severely overfished, have responded with a "Caribbean Challenge," which will set aside a fifth of their waters for coral and fish recovery.
In the United States, the largest protected area is the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, established in 2006 around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. It's about 140,000 square miles, larger than all the other U.S. national parks put together. Commercial fishing is expected to be phased out in the area by 2011. The reserve is home to rare and endangered fish as well as turtles, whales, seals and birds.
Marine reserves have proved to be even more effective than researchers hoped. In a recent study of more than 600 miles of coastline in the Great Barrier Reef where fishing was banned only two years earlier, populations of a popular grouper, locally known as the coral trout, were up to 68 percent higher than in areas where fishing had continued.
"It's much better to conserve than to rehabilitate," says Alan Friedlander, a fisheries ecologist with the biogeography branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Honolulu. "An area as large and as pristine as the Phoenix Islands still has all the pieces of the puzzle that we need to understand how a reef ecosystem works. It's going to tell us what we need to know to use the most effective methods to rehabilitate the reefs where overfishing collapses the delicate balance of nature."
Gregory Stone, a marine biologist at the New England Aquarium in Boston, is one of the prime movers behind the Kiribati reserve. He got a call from Rob Barrel, the operator of a luxury dive boat based in Fiji, who was assembling a group of scientists to study the islands in 2000 on behalf of some conservation-minded divers. Stone jumped at the chance to visit what he calls "the last unexplored oceanic coral reef archipelago in the world."
It was an eye-opening 11 days. "We were completely blown away by the density of marine life we saw—none of us had seen anything like it," Stone recalls. "We would dive into schools of big fish that were so thick they dulled the sunlight like clouds passing above. Looking down, we saw thousands of smaller fish blanketing the reef like flocks of birds." Off the island of Hull, he adds, "the density of giant clams was more than I'd even known existed. There were hundreds of thousands of them, their mantles were like a kaleidoscope."
"For me," Stone says, "it was the first time I had seen what the ocean may have been like thousands of years ago."
That, in itself, was a major discovery. Scientists have a pretty good idea of what terrestrial wildlife and forests and deserts looked like before people started cutting trees, draining swamps and wiping out some species and introducing others. But the oceans' past has long been rather a blank. We fished first and asked questions later. One of the first great cases of overfishing, of north Atlantic cod, began in the 19th century, long before the scuba tank allowed us to get a good look underwater. Surviving accounts of fantastically abundant marine life, starting with explorers like Ferdinand Columbus (Christopher's son), seemed so different from what 20th-century fishermen and researchers had found that "people were wary to believe the history," says marine ecologist Stuart Sandin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "Scientific diving on coral reefs began in the 1950s, and the goal at first was descriptive. No one worried about whether what they were seeing was natural or had been modified by people."
It was only in the 1990s that marine scientists became aware of what Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist at the University of British Columbia, calls the shifting baseline syndrome—the problem of establishing historic populations of marine life in a given species or community. Just what is a healthy number of, say, red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico? "Each generation [of scientists] accepts as a base line the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of [that generation's] career," says Pauly. The result is that, over time, the expectation of the natural number of fish in the sea gets smaller and smaller—until the population is so small that even a modest environmental perturbation, or a tad more fishing, causes it to unexpectedly collapse, as the cod population collapsed off Newfoundland and Labrador in the early 1990s.
By the time Stone's team arrived in the Phoenix Islands, marine biologists "were all subconsciously searching for the place that was truly pristine, that would end the debate about what a truly pristine reef should look like," Stone recalls. "And we knew it when we found it."
Obura says that once he dived into the waters of the Phoenix Islands, "I realized this was the holy grail and wondered how long it would last."
