Monster reserve: Spectacularly vibrant anemone fish crowd around a thriving reef off Manra Island in the Phoenix Islands, Kiribati. To see so many of them in one place is extremely unusual anywhere else.
Credit: Paul Nicklen/Getty Images
Now, in 2008, the parliament is drafting legislation that will create the trust fund. It's estimated that while the reserve is only 11.7 per cent of Kiribati's waters, about 20 per cent of tuna fishing in Kiribati takes place there, so the government is figuring out whether it will decrease the fishing licenses (typically US$150,000 a year for all Kiribati waters for each purse-seiner and US$25,000 a year for each long-liner) or simply impose the ban.
In the latter case, the trust fund would go towards fuel for the country's single patrol boat, donated by Australia. Cynics say the purse seiners will illegally turn off the electronic devices that broadcast their position and fish right into the reserve, gambling that they won't be caught in the act.
Kiribati could also ask Australia for a second patrol boat, which would be dedicated to the Phoenix Islands and based in Canton. New Zealand and Australia have both pledged increased air patrols over the islands.
THE PHOENIX ISLANDS PROJECT comes at a time marine ecologists are finally getting their teeth into the field's Holy Grail: the long-missing baseline. While in terrestrial ecology we have descriptions of what Europe, North America and other places looked like before humans started cutting trees and killing animals, in the oceans things happened the other way around: first we fished, then we looked.
North Atlantic cod was decimated centuries before the underwater face-mask was invented, for instance. So as we dream up conservation policies, we don't have a full understanding of how a healthy reef functions in the first place.
That understanding is emerging from the Line Islands, east of the Phoenix Islands. There, a team led by members of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, has been at work studying Kingman Reef, which lies some 65 km from Palmyra, an island with a marine lab. They are both wildlife refuges managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The other two atolls in the Line Islands, Fanning and Christmas, belong to Kiribati.
Over the past 25 years, Fanning has seen its population grow from 500 to 2,500 people and Christmas from 1,500 to 5,100. Since 2005, the scientists have been analysing in minute detail – right down to microbes – what they call the gradient of human disturbance from Kingman to Christmas.
What they found surprised them. Kingman teemed with sharks and jacks and other
so-called apex predators, but the smaller fish were largely invisible – until divers stuck their heads in the reef's nooks and crannies and found them stuffed with terrified fish!
When the scientists did a biomass count, estimating the combined weight of all the fish in a given area, they came up with a whopping 5.3 metric tonnes per hectare. According to Alan Friedlander, a Hawaii-based ecologist on the team, that compares with 0.9 to 2.4 tonnes per hectare for the Great Barrier Reef, now the world's third-largest marine reserve, and 1.2 to 4.5 tonnes in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, now the second-largest. The latter has been nearly untouched for decades, but being farther north and more isolated, it's less productive.
As they moved from Kingman to Christmas, the biomass numbers fell dramatically: Palmyra had 2.5, Fanning 1.7, and Christmas, where nearly all the sharks have been killed for their fins, had just 1.3 tons per hectare.
Also, there were 10 times more microbes near Christmas (where runoff is negligible and there's no fertiliser) than in Kingman, whose coral reefs themselves were much healthier even though there were plenty of herbivorous fish in the Christmas area.
The explanation, says Stuart Sandin of Scripps, is that large numbers of sharks favour tangs, which move in schools and are big algae grazers. In the absence of sharks, damselfish dominate the waters, and they are like algae farmers: they eat it, but also conserve it. The large amounts of algae in Christmas release lots of sugar in the water, which feeds the bacteria, who then feed on coral larvae when the coral reproduce. Result: corals in Kingman easily recovered from a spike in water temperatures that took place in 2002, while the ones in Christmas did not.
The study suggests that the key to healthy reefs is having lots of sharks. These reefs, says Jim Maragos, a coral specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Hawaii, should grow as fast as sea levels rise. Those elsewhere, which are growing little if at all, are likely to die.
What the Line Islands team thought was a pristine environment may be badly impacted by humans compared to the Phoenix Islands. In 2009, a biomass analysis of the Phoenix Islands will be completed – providing even more insight into this ever-shifting baseline.
Christopher Pala lives in Hawaii and has written for The New York Times, Science and Newsweek. He is the author of The Oddest Place on Earth: Rediscovering the North Pole.
climate
I hate to be pessimistic but it is a shame that just a few degrees rise in temperature could severely threaten marine ecosystems. By shame I mean frightening and saddening. Let us enjoy them while they exist in their current state.