Reef Health

[JohnnyH]

I believe this has been asked over the years - but I'd love to get a feel from all you divers out there who are diving all over the world.

What's your take on the overall well-being of our reefs? It seems to me that with global temps on the rise and increased reported incidents of broad bleaching events, increased boat traffic, ... that the members of this forum would be a great leading indicator as to how things are doing.

I'm most interested in hearing about locations that you have dived over the course of many years. Interestingly enough, for my experience, I've returned to places to discover absurd over development topside but beautiful coral below (case in point - I dove Cozumel in 1989 and returned to it in '04 and was very impressed by the health and diversity of the underwater env.)

Until the past seven years I have spent much time down in the FL keys and have a definite love of the place but was never too impressed with the coral life (hard or soft). However I was just down visting a friend in Key Largo and did several dives and came away with a positive feeling - the reef seemed very healthy.

As for first time visits, I've recently been somewhat dismayed by some first time visits, such as the Great Barrier Reef or Vieques island in PR (which had been closed to tourism for so many years due to the Navy) - with huge regions of dead and dying coral and limited animal diversity.

Anyway - since there's so much experience and diversity on this forum, I thought I'd ask.

John

 

[String]

I wast stunned by how poor quality the reef around key large was when i visited. Huge patches of dead coral or bare ground. Came expecting a lot better condition reef and diving than i actually witnessed.

 

[KeyLargoJaclyn]

I have only been a diver since 2002 and have only dove in the Florida keys so i will not be much help to you but working in a dive operation here in Key Largo it is a main concern of mine and we ask similiar questions to your's! A friend of mine who I have worked with for years he is a captain where I work has been here in the Keys all of his life has told me how beautiful it was 20 years ago. He says there is no comparision. So for people with experience like his I guess it can be a sad site, but for novice divers like me who don't know what they are missing, I think our underworld is so amazing that I really would like to find a way to care for it better and wish that all would take care of like some of us do.. yesterday I dove on Molasses reef and found a few articles of trach and picked them up through out my dive they were freshly put there with no growth. That is one catch to cleaning up underwater, if has growth allready it is a habitat to coral and other living breathing organisms so you can not touch it. As far as caring for the overall health of the reefs I wish there was more we could do...
Thank you for posting an eye opening thread, We need to keep this topic fresh in divers minds it is our underwater world and we need to keep it beautiful!
keyLargojaclyn

 

[DennisS]

I started diving the keys in the early 70's, I took part in several projects studying the reefs during this period. They were looking good back then, really spectacular. I had a job that had me traveling all over the world for about 20 years. I revisited the keys in the mid 90's and was shocked at how bad the reef system had become, it continues to decline. Thirty years is a short period of time to see such a change.

In a lot of countries with reefs, the animal diversity of the reef gets eaten. You see fish markets with every kind of fish you can think of, a lot of them in the small 6-8 inch size.

 

[Bruciebabe]

From my website ( http://www.scubabrucie.com/ ):

A marine ecosystem is a lot different from a land ecosystem. On land the food chain is usually very simple, carnivore eats herbivore. In the water the food chain is usually very long with a large number of small steps all the way from plankton up to shark. So if you remove a species from the food chain it has a huge impact on the whole ecosystem. The species below it are under predated on and rise in number while the species above it lose a source of food and become less plentiful. So if you for example removed the species that predate on parrot fish then they would become excessive in numbers and cause destruction of hard corals.

Fishing is not the romantic worm on a hook and hope for something to come along model that some think it is. Fishing is a form of hunting where the fisherman uses a range of techniques to target the specific species that he wants to catch based on the economic or food value of that fish.

So by allowing fishing everywhere on the marine park in Bonaire the whole ecosystem is distorted. Other marine parks throughout the world either have no take zones or are totally no take. Spain has the reputation for the most rapacious fishermen in the world but they still managed the spectacular success of the no take Medas marine park, read about it here http://www.bsactravelclub.co.uk/reports/medas1.html . In Australia 33% of the Great Barrier Reef is closed to all extractive uses including fishing, other countries such as USA and South Africa are working towards this figure.

It is not just the removal of the fish in Bonaire that is the problem, it is the way that it is done. The local fishermen do not want to lose expensive anchors in the jumble that is a reef so they use boulders and building blocks wrapped in string. These they just drop onto the reef doing indiscriminate damage. Not only that, but on one trip they will lift it and drop it repeatedly as they hunt their prey, sometimes on to delicate 500 year old corals. If you keep your eyes open on a dive you will often see these boulders and building blocks abandoned when they have become jammed, it is also probably why you see so many uprooted soft corals. Look in to the fishing boats in the harbour and you will see what they use. And this is supposed to be a marine park.

It is not so many years since the men of Bonaire were forced to leave the island to find work. Now, with tourism, this is no longer necessary and the Bonarian population have become a lot better off from the many tens of millions of dollars that tourism brings to the island. The main reason for this tourism is the diving. It is just unbelievable that the govenment allows the quality of this diving to be so damaged for the miniscule economic value that reef fishing provides.

What is really galling is that the marine park on Bonaire has 2 extensive no dive zones so that they can gauge the impact of diving. As science this rates alongside creationism as total lunacy. It is obvious that the fishing has a far greater and far worse effect on the ecosystem than diving. So for proper science they need 4 different sorts of areas. No fishing or diving, just no fishing, just no diving and finaly areas were both are allowed. They need to have several of each of these to cover the full range of habitats that are present on the island.

 

[Richesb]

There is no doubt that the reef has suffered from multiple causes over the years. No one thing can be defined as the cause. We find evidence of abuse from anchors, litter, lost traps. Water temps have risen and stayed warmer longer in recent years. But is this a cause I do not know. Diving mostly in deeper water I don't find polution from sewerage discharges. But we do see grass beds grownig dramatically in size nearshore which is a sign they are receiving additional nutrients from land based sources.

 

[Biodiversity_guy]

It does seem like most areas, Bonaire included, benefit when 30+ % of their total area is placed in a no-take no harvest status: all sorts of fish and other species rebound quickly and the positive effects spread across the greater area, as the breeders are larger and have higher fecundity.

It is also apparent that, on top of global warming, the reefs are very sensitive to excess nutrients being added from rivers and the fertilizers/top soils eroding after rains. With such a nutrient scarce system, adding extra fertilizer causes the system to get out of wack: just thinking about the crown of thorn seastars and the increased survival of their larval stage.

Keep river systems healthy and reducing erosion will be key to keeping our reef's diversity high.

Stable, resistance, resiliency: lets hope our reefs these in abundance.

 

[Bill51]

Over the past 45 years I’ve seen reefs get worse, better, than worse again in some areas, and just completely different in other areas – and who is the one to say that a different reef ecosystem is better than another one? On the whole, I think many popular reefs are under a lot of pressure, but the same tourism that creates that pressure also creates the forces to help protect them from other potential damage.

Two years ago we discovered a new reef with soft corals, sponges, and tropicals just off the Kennedy Space Center and it appears to have sprung up a new ecosystem in only the past 10 years or so. We think there is just an odd confluence of protection due to the KSC security zone, and interesting currents formed from the warmer outflow of water from the Indian river into the ocean – which may be a result of the powerplants in the area.