Participation Important for Healthy Marine Parks

The involvement of locals is a key ingredient in the success of marine parks which protect coral reefs and fish stocks.

The largest-scale study to date of how coastal communities influence successful outcomes in marine reserves has found that human population pressure was a critical factor in whether or not a reserve succeeded in protecting marine resources -- but so too was local involvement in research and management.
The team looked at how successful coral reef marine reserves were at conserving fish stocks. They studied 56 marine reserves from 19 different countries throughout Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean.
"About ¾ of the marine reserves we studied showed a positive difference in the amount of fish inside compared to outside -- so most reserves we studied were working" says Dr Josh Cinner of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.
"However, the differences weren't always large. The most successful reserves showed really big differences of 14 times the amount of fish inside compared to outside, but that wasn't always the case.
"What we were most interested in, was understanding what made some reserves more successful than others. One of the best predictors of how 'successful' a marine reserve was, is actually the size of the human communities around the reserve -- but interestingly, this varied in different regions.
"In the Indian Ocean, for example, where reserves are government-controlled and moderate in size (around six square kilometres on average), having lots of people nearby had a positive effect. But this could be because marine resources outside the reserve are heavily degraded, accentuating the healthier state of those inside the reserve.
"In the Caribbean, we found the opposite. Large human populations near reserves led to poor performance of the reserve -- which may be due to low compliance or poor enforcement in marine parks near population centers," Dr Cinner said.
The other key ingredient for a successful marine reserve was the level of poaching in the reserve. But importantly, the team found that compliance with reserve rules was not just related to the level of enforcement, but also to a range of social, political, and economic factors which enabled people to co-operate better in protecting their marine resources. Reserves worked best where there was a formal consultation processes about reserve rules, where local people were able to participate in monitoring the reserve, and when ongoing training for community members was provided so that they could better understand the science and policy.
"It was clear that this type of local involvement was a very important factor in building the local support necessary to make reserves successful. Park agencies need to foster conditions that enable people to work together to protect their local environment, voluntarily, rather than focusing purely on regulations and patrols.
"Enforcement will almost always be an important part of a successful reserve, but there is a lot of ocean out there to patrol and many of the places we studied were poor, developing countries which don't have the luxury of being able to invest in lots of patrol boats.

Marine Protected Areas: A Solution for Saving the Penguin

Researchers from the Centre d'écologie fonctionnelle et évolutive (CNRS/Universités Montpellier 1, 2, 3/Montpellier SupAgro/CIRAD/EPHE) and the University of the Cape in South Africa (1) have shown that closing fishing zones in the ocean has a beneficial effect on Cape penguins, an endangered species endemic to Southern Africa that feeds exclusively on fish. This result comes from a unique experiment carried out by the researchers on two penguin colonies, with the collaboration of government authorities and the South African fishing industries.

These results are published on 10 February 2010 on the website of the journal Biology Letters.
The Cape penguin Spheniscus demersus (the only African penguin) is endangered as a result of the 60% decline in its worldwide population between 2001 and 2009. This decline can be attributed to a dearth of food, due to displacement of the banks of sardines and anchovies which these birds feed on. Competition with the fisheries which exploit the last remaining fish around the South African penguin colonies exacerbates the threat to the species. Faced with this crisis situation, and working with researchers and the South African fish industries, the South African governmental agency overseeing fisheries (Marine and Coastal Management) closed to fishing in January 2009 a 20-km radius ocean area around the largest Cape penguin colony (on the island of St Croix, Algoa Bay). A "witness" zone around another penguin colony (Bird Island), 50 km east of St Croix in the same bay, has remained open to fishing in order to enable researchers to compare penguin feeding behaviors.
The researchers studied the food-seeking behavior of 91 birds in these two colonies, thanks to GPS recorders, in 2008 and 2009, namely before and after the area was closed to fishing. The miniature recorders, in watertight hydrodynamic boxes, were attached to the feathers at the base of the birds' backs with adhesive. The goal was to record the latitude and longitude of the birds every minute, and the hydrostatic pressure (diving depth) every second. These data made it possible to calculate the effort each bird expended in searching for food, in terms of the length of time spent traveling, the distance covered, the number, depth and location of dives.
The results are striking: In 2008, before the area was closed to fishing, the St Croix penguins mainly fished (75% of dives) more than 20 km from their colony, covering up to 150 km in two days in their search for food. In 2009, on the other hand, only 3 months after the area had been closed to fishing, 70% of dives were less than 20 km away, within the protected marine area. The time devoted to searching for food also decreased by 30%, which reduced their daily energy expenditure by 40%. By way of comparison, the area within which the Bird Island penguins (the control colony) searched for food remained the same both years, with the penguins even expending more energy searching for food in 2009.
This experiment shows the immediate benefits of the creation of a Marine Protected Area for the preservation of an endangered top marine predator species. The study confirms the negative impact of industrial fishing on feeding conditions for African penguins and also demonstrates the crucial importance of Marine Protected Areas (2) on endangered species conservation. When appropriately defined, these areas can facilitate the restoration of ocean ecosystems (3) damaged by the combined effects of climate change and overfishing.
Notes:
(1) Of the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology.
(2) The 1992 Rio convention stipulates that 10% of marine surfaces be protected. Nonetheless, only 0,8% of these surfaces is currently reserves. In this context, the creation of Marine Protected Areas (MPA) which help preserve marine predators which feed on mobile prey such as ocean fish, is urgent. This strategy is nonetheless controversial, as it is difficult, in open water, to clearly delimit PMAs which aim to preserve species as mobiles as superior predators and their prey. The general principle is that these reserves must be very large in order to encompass the vast habitats of marine predators; this makes it more difficult to set them up and manage them.
(3) Plankton, both phytoplankton and zooplankton, fish (notably sardines and anchovies), all living organisms in the water column between the ocean surface and bottom and which play a central role in the marine ecosystem.

Marine Reserves Can Be An Effective Tool For Managing Fisheries

Studies conducted in California and elsewhere provide support for the use of marine reserves as a tool for managing fisheries and protecting marine habitats, according to biologists at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

A recent study in the Gulf of California, for example, confirmed the validity of a key concept behind marine reserves--the idea that offspring produced in a protected area can replenish the stocks of harvested species outside the reserve.
"It seems really obvious, but it had never been tested," said Peter Raimondi, professor and chair of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCSC and coauthor of a paper describing the findings in the journal PLoS One.
"We created a model to predict the dispersal of larvae outside the reserves, and the results were completely consistent with our predictions," he said.
Raimondi is involved in a collaborative project (called PANGAS) in which researchers are working with Mexican fishing communities to study and manage fisheries in the northern Gulf of California. Local fishermen in the area of Puerto Peñasco set up a network of marine reserves as part of a community-based effort to manage their resources. Ecological and social studies conducted before, during, and after the establishment of those reserves enabled the researchers to track the results.
Raimondi emphasized that resource managers have a wide range of tools at their disposal and must take into account both biological and social factors in choosing the best approach. Many species, such as tuna and squid, move around too much to be protected by setting aside certain areas. For species that tend to stay put, marine protected areas can range from no-take reserves to various levels of limited harvesting, and sometimes involve restrictions on who can harvest fish in an area rather than how much can be taken.
The establishment of marine protected areas along the California coast, as called for in the 1999 Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), has been controversial. A network of protected areas was established on the Central Coast in 2006, and a plan for the North-Central Coast was adopted in August 2009. In Southern California, a task force will soon make recommendations to the state Fish and Game Commission, while on the North Coast the planning process is just getting started.
Raimondi and Mark Carr, also a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCSC, have been actively involved in this initiative. In addition to serving on science advisory teams, they are engaged in an intensive monitoring program to track the effects of the reserves that have already been established.
"We are monitoring those areas at unprecedented levels. It's a comprehensive effort to characterize the populations and the ecosystems so that we can compare the responses to different types of protection," Carr said. "Monitoring studies around the globe systematically show positive responses within protected areas. We want to really identify what aspects of reserve design are important in influencing those benefits."
According to Carr, it will take a few more years of monitoring to see the effects of the Central Coast reserves. In the Channel Islands, however, where reserves were established in 2003 (separately from the MLPA process), surveys have yielded the kinds of results scientists expect to see in protected areas. For example, fish species targeted by fishermen tend to be bigger and more plentiful within the reserves.
This effect is important, because studies have shown that larger, older females are much more important than younger fish in maintaining healthy populations of species such as West Coast rockfish.
"When you have a protected population, you not only get spillover effects when fish swim out of the reserve and get caught, you also have major effects on larval production," Carr said. "The bigger, older fish in the reserve produce a lot of larvae that replenish the fished populations outside."
Carr, who contributed to a report on the first five years of monitoring in the Channel Islands, said that the conclusions are limited by a lack of data collected before the reserves were created. It is possible that some of the observed differences existed before the areas were protected, but such doubts will be erased if current population trends continue, he said.
In Puerto Peñasco, the shellfish harvested by local fishermen grow and reproduce quickly. As a result, the fishermen saw beneficial effects within a year after they had established a network of reserves. Subsequent events, however, underscored the role of social factors in the success of fishery management efforts. A second paper, published in PLoS ONE in July, describes how, after its initial success, the local reserve system collapsed due to poaching by outsiders.
"The whole thing got wiped out due to disruption of the social structure that had supported it," Raimondi said. "Scientifically it was really interesting, but for the people who experienced it on the ground, it was terrible."
Richard Cudney-Bueno, a research associate at UCSC's Institute of Marine Sciences and cofounder of the PANGAS project, is the lead author of both papers. "Here was a group of fishermen that had already seen some declines in the shellfish they harvested. This led to the implementation of community-based efforts to manage their resources, including the establishment of marine reserves," he said. "We found that local control of community resources can work, but there has to be broader government support to back up the local efforts."
A native of Mexico City, Cudney-Bueno has been working with Mexican fishing communities and conducting ecological and social research in the Gulf of California since the mid-1990s. He now has a joint position with UCSC, the University of Arizona, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
The first reserve in the Puerto Peñasco area was established in 2001 around an island. Cudney-Bueno and other researchers, working with a Mexican nonprofit organization (Centro Intercultural de Estudios de Desiertos y Océanos), trained the fishermen to monitor shellfish populations in and around the reserve. "The response was really quick, so they could see a classic reserve effect one year later," Cudney-Bueno said. "That led to more areas being closed, and the first paper shows the effects of the network of reserves."
The cooperative was so successful it was recognized by the Mexican government with a Presidential Conservation Award. But word spread quickly along the coast about the thriving shellfish populations in Puerto Peñasco, and other fishermen from outside the community began to move in and poach from the reserves. After poaching began, the system of cooperation that had established and protected the reserves broke down.
Now, the situation is beginning to improve again, Cudney-Bueno said. The Mexican government has created one of a handful of exclusive fishing zones in the Gulf of California, giving the local cooperative the exclusive legal right to harvest shellfish in the Puerto Peñasco area.
"They now have a strong management plan with legal rights and government support, so I think they will be able to get back to where they were before the poaching started," Cudney-Bueno said. "I see it as part of the evolution of a management system. Social change takes time, and it really hasn't been that long. A lot is happening now in Mexico and around the world as local people are increasingly asking for control over their resources. Various fishing communities in Mexico, including lobster and abalone fishermen in Baja California, have moved forward with the establishment of their own marine reserves and government-backed forms of territorial-use rights."
The PANGAS project, which brings together experts from UCSC, the University of Arizona, and several collaborating academic institutions and nonprofit organizations in Mexico, is working with other fishing communities in the Gulf of California to develop management plans for the region's marine resources.
"PANGAS is now working with the Mexican government to build management plans for a series of species in the northern Gulf of California," Raimondi said. "It's interesting to compare that with the MLPA process in California. The approaches are very different, and it has to do with differences in government and social structures."
According to Carr, the California MLPA process is now being used as a model in other parts of the world, most notably in the United Kingdom.

World's Largest Marine Protected Area Created In Pacific Ocean

The small Pacific Island nation of Kiribati has become a global conservation leader by establishing the world's largest marine protected area – a California-sized ocean wilderness of pristine coral reefs and rich fish populations threatened by over-fishing and climate change।

The Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) conserves one of the Earth's last intact oceanic coral archipelago ecosystems, consisting of eight coral atolls and two submerged reef systems in a nearly uninhabited region of abundant marine and bird life. The 410,500-square-kilometer (158,453-square-mile) protected area also includes underwater mountains and other deep-sea habitat.
Kiribati first declared the creation of PIPA at the 2006 Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Brazil. On January 30, 2008, Kiribati adopted formal regulations for PIPA that more than doubled the original size to make it the largest marine protected area on Earth.
Kiribati and the New England Aquarium (NEAq) developed PIPA over several years of joint scientific research, with funding and technical assistance from Conservation International's (CI) Global Conservation Fund and Pacific Islands Program. The CI support for PIPA is part of the Coral Reef Initiative in the South Pacific (CRISP).
"Kiribati has taken an inspirational step in increasing the size of PIPA well beyond the original eight atolls and globally important seabird, fish and coral reef communities," said Greg Stone, the NEAq vice-president of global marine programs. "The new boundary includes extensive seamount and deep sea habitat, tuna spawning grounds, and as yet unsurveyed submerged reef systems."
Located near the equator in the Central Pacific between Hawaii and Fiji, the Phoenix Islands form an archipelago several hundred miles long. They are part of the Republic of Kiribati, which comprises three distinct island groups (Gilbert Islands, Phoenix Islands, and Line Islands) with a total of 33 islands to make it the largest atoll nation in the world.
"The creation of this amazing marine protected area by a small island nation in the Pacific represents a commitment of historic proportions; and all of this by a country that is under serious threat from sea-level rise attributed to global warming," said CI President Russell A। Mittermeier. "The Republic of Kiribati has now set a standard for other countries in the Pacific and elsewhere in the world. We are proud to be associated with this effort that helps the people of Kiribati, and we call on governments and private conservation groups everywhere to support Kiribati in its efforts and make similar commitments to protect their own natural systems."

Three NEAq-led research expeditions since 2000 found great marine biodiversity, including more than 120 species of coral and 520 species of fish, some new to science. Some of the most important seabird nesting populations in the Pacific, as well as healthy fish populations and the presence of sea turtles and other species, demonstrated the pristine nature of the area and its importance as a migration route.
Protecting the Phoenix Islands means restricting commercial fishing in the area, resulting in a loss of revenue that the Kiribati government would normally receive from issuing foreign commercial fishing licenses. NEAq and CI are helping Kiribati design an endowment system that will cover the core recurring management costs of PIPA and compensate the government for the foregone commercial fishing license revenues. The plan allows for subsistence fishing by resident communities and other sustainable economic development in designated zones of the protected area.
Keeping oceans and marine ecosystems intact and healthy allows them to better resist the impacts of climate change and continue their natural role of sequestering atmospheric carbon that causes global warming.
Adapted from materials provided by Conservation International.

Key Found To Moonlight Romance On The Reef

An international team of Australian and Israeli researchers has discovered what could be the aphrodisiac for the biggest moonlight sex event on Earth।

An ancient light-sensitive gene has been isolated by researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) that appears to act as a trigger for the annual mass spawning of corals across a third of a million square kilometres of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, shortly after a full moon.
The genes, known as a cryptochromes, occur in corals, insects, fish and mammals - including humans - and are primitive light-sensing pigment mechanisms which predate the evolution of eyes.
In a new paper published in Science, the team, headed by Marie Curie Scholar Dr Oren Levy of CoECRS and the University of Queensland, reports its discovery that the Cry2 gene, stimulated by the faint blue light of the full moon, appears to play a central role in triggering the mass coral spawning event, one of nature’s wonders.
Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who leads the University of Queensland laboratory in which the genes were discovered, said “This is the key to one of the central mysteries of coral reefs. We have always wondered how corals without eyes can detect moonlight and get the precise hour of the right couple of days each year to spawn.”
What allows corals to spawn simultaneously along the immense length of the Great Barrier Reef - and also in other parts of the world - has been a scientific mystery till now, though researchers knew that tide, water temperature and weather conditions played a part, says Dr Levy। However the remarkable synchronisation of spawning occurring all along the Reef immediately following a full moon suggested that moonlight was a key factor.

Exposing corals to different colours and intensities of light and sampling live corals on reefs around the time of the full moon, Dr Levy found the Cry2 gene at its most active in Acropora corals during full moon nights. “We think these genes developed in primitive life forms in the Precambrian, more than 500 million years ago, as a way of sensing light,” he explains. “The fact they are linked with the system that repairs damage from ultraviolet (UV) radiation suggests they may evolved in eyeless creatures which needed to avoid high daytime UV by living deep in the water, but still needed to sense the blue light shed by the moon to synchronise their body clocks and breeding cycles.”
“They are, in a sense, the functional forerunners of eyes,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.
In humans, cryptochromes still operate as part of the circadian system that tunes us to the rhythms of our planet, though their light-sensing function appears lost to us, he went on to explain.
“They play important roles in regulating the body-clocks of many species, from corals to fruit flies, to zebra fish and mice. The proteins they produce are similar to those in humans and other mammals, though they appear to function more like those in the fruit fly,” says Professor David Miller of CoECRS and JCU.
The coral cryptochrome genes were initially identified by Dr Levy and Dr Bill Leggat working with Professor Hoegh-Guldberg (UQ) on Heron Island. Prof. Miller and Dr David Hayward, of the Australian National University, were able to add information on the coral cryptochromes from a large library of coral genes that they have been compiling (so far they have catalogued about 10,000 out of an estimated 20-25,000 genes in coral), and leading circadian clock biologists from Bar-Ilan and Tel-Aviv Universities in Israel played important roles in interpreting the data.
“Many of these genes developed in deep time, in the earliest phases of organised life on the planet,” Dr Leggat says. “They were preserved for hundreds of millions of years before being inherited by corals when they developed about 240 million years ago, and are still found today in modern animals and humans. They are an indicator that corals and humans are in fact distant relatives, sharing a common ancestor way back.”
Whether they have anything at all to do with human associations between the full moon and romance is not known, but cryptochromes probably still play a part in our body clock.
Adapted from materials provided by ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies.

Netrani marine park

Netrani Island, a coral reef, 18 km off Murdeshwar in the Arabian Sea, will be a national marine park, according to a proposal to be submitted to the Centre. The island is unpolluted and the sea water here is crystal clear, harbouring hundreds of species of marine life. It is also home to a host of aquatic birds. There is no siltation up to a depth of 30 metres water around the island. Therefore, it is considered an ideal site for a national marine park. There are a lot of coral islets around the island. Netrani Island could be developed as a National Biodiversity Study Centre as all sea creatures move around freely in the calm waters, thus attracting marine biologists from the world over.N D Tiwari, member-secretary, State Biodiversity Board, visited the island on Tuesday, along with Gangadhar Madikeri, Biodiversity Board Officer and S Bhat and V N Nayak, marine biologists.

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Denmark funds $4 mln central marine preservation

Denmark funds $4 mln central marine preservation

The Danish government will continue its funding of the Cu Lao Cham marine
reserve in the central Quang Nam province this year, to the tune of US$4
million.

The Denmark-funded marine park kicked off in the province in 2003 targeting
to protect valuable habitats and biodiversity in Cu Lao Cham Island without
compromising the livehood requirements of poor communities.

The project has helped local residents find alternative ways to earn a
living besides fishing, which threatens to destroy the marine environment.

The new fund will focus on free training courses on handy-crafts and
campaigns to raise further awareness on marine protection among the
community.

The marine park is the second marine reserve under the Vietnam's project to
develop a network of 15 marine parks nationwide.

Danida and the Vietnamese Fisheries Ministry have also identified five
priority preservation areas, including Phu Quoc, Con Co, Bach Long Vi, Co To
and Con Dao islands.

Cu Lao Cham marine reserve includes eight islands and 5,175 hectares of
water surface. The marine park boasts 165 coral reefs, around 500 hectares
of seaweed and seagrass, and various sea creatures.

Scientists have recently found 135 coral species, including the six species
discovered in Vietnam's waters for the first time, 202 fish species, four
species of lobster, and 84 reptile species on Cu Lao Cham.

The country's first sea park under the project is the Hon Mun marine
reserve, which was set up in 2000 in Khanh Hoa province with funding and
assistance from Danish International Development Agency (Danida), the World
Bank, and the World Conservation Union.

The park covers 12,100 hectares of sea and several islands, and is home to
173 coral species and 176 fish species.

Vietnam's marine preservation network has played a key role in ensuring
marine ecological balance protecting biodiversity, and creating a harmonious
environment conducive to sustainable economic development.

However, the past years have witnessed a decline in marine wildlife and a
degradation of the ocean environment as a result of overexploitation.

Reported by Hua Xuyen Huynh - Compiled by Ha Dong