Tropical paradise: Grey reef sharks and humpback whales are just a few of the species that will benefit from the new reserves (hit play, above, for another image).
Credit: Juergen Freund
Tropical paradise: Grey reef sharks and humpback whales are just a few of the species that will benefit from the new reserves.
Credit: Micaela Fischer/Pew Environmental Group
Ending a five-month suspense, President George W. Bush this week took a bold step in ocean conservation, breaking a record he set previously with the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, by closing to fishing seven remote patches of Pacific Ocean that, put together, would be larger than Spain.
The decision seems to be an effort on Bush’s part to leave some lasting positive legacy. Though much admonished for other aspects of his environmental record, Bush’s marine monuments, now totalling 850,000 km 2 – far more than ever created before – have delighted marine scientists at a time the oceans are suffering from overfishing and the effects of climate change and acidification.
But by extending no-take areas to 50 nautical miles (92 km) off 11 islands to create a new area of 505,000 km2, he still fell far short of the 1.9 million km2 of fishing-free ocean he could have imposed if he had closed commercial fishing in the entire Exclusive Economic Zone off each of the islands. The zone extends out 200 nautical miles (370 km) from shore.
"The monuments will prohibit resource destruction or extraction, waste dumping and commercial fishing," Bush said to reporters on Tuesday. "They will allow for research, free passage, and recreation - including the possibility of recreational fishing one day. For seabirds and marine life, they will be sanctuaries to grow and thrive. For scientists, they will be places to extend the frontiers of discovery."
Jay Nelson, Director of Ocean Legacy for the Pew Environment Group in Washington DC, called Tuesday’s move “The single largest marine conservation act in history. We hope that other maritime nations with a history of conservation achievements, such as Australia, will take this example and improve on it,” he added. “The Coral Sea is a perfect example.”
Imogen Zethoven, Coral Sea Campaign director, said she hoped the process to create the Australian preserve would be completed next year.
Pew has been advocating turning 357,000 km2 of ocean in the Australian EEZ off the Great Barrier Reef into a Coral Sea Marine Park where fishing would end.
The proposal is being considered by the government. The Pew group also helped midwife the Northwestern Islands reserve, which Bush turned into what was then the biggest in the world two years ago.
Following Bush’s own 360,000 km2 Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands in 2006, the government of the central Pacific nation of Kiribati in 2007 declared half the EEZ of its uninhabited Phoenix Islands the 'Phoenix Islands Protected Area', gradually putting 410,000 km2 off-limits to fishing (see, Ocean wilderness is size of California).
Kiribati went on to join a group of other Central Pacific nations in the Nauru Agreement that will effectively end fishing in another 790,000 km2 of international tuna-rich waters around the equator by 2011, the same year fishing is scheduled to end in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
Most of the islands and their reefs in Bush's new monuments are already protected, so the main beneficiaries will be declining stocks of bigeye and yellowfin tuna, and along with the birds, sharks, turtles and dolphins that are accidentally caught by the tuna long-liner boats.
Biologically rich but fragile seamounts, vulnerable to destruction from trawlers, will also be saved.
The first marine monument, and the most interesting to science, surrounds the islands – all of them uninhabited nature reserves – of Maug, Asuncion and Uracus in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, just south of Iwo Jima, Japan. A second part protects the Marianas Trench, further south. Their sponsor is also Pew.
The Marianas are rich in submerged volcanoes and in biodiversity. Maug, whose caldera forms a lagoon that extends down 245 m, has amazing underwater vents that acidify the water column above so that a dead zone lies right next to one rich in coral and fish, say scientists who have dived there.
They predict that the place will be intensely studied in the future to understand how coral reacts to the acidification that is expected when the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed into the oceans.
