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
TO REACH THE CUTTING EDGE of the marine conservation movement, you first have to fly to Tarawa, the site of the capital of Kiribati, a Micronesian country so poor that its national airline can't afford air links between its two most populous islands, let alone to a foreign country.
Air Kiribati confines its two small turboprops to the Gilbert Islands. There's only one way to reach Tarawa, and that's via Fiji on Air Pacific.
Tarawa is as skinny as any atoll, but instead of being shaped like the usual O, it's an L inverted sideways. For the most part, there's just a single road, and as you head west from the airport, you'll see a somewhat laissez-faire attitude to rubbish.
Car skeletons are often kept, alongside tethered pigs, in front of houses. At first glance, the I-Kiribati (pronounced 'E Kiribasi' as locals call themselves) don't look like the planet's most conservation-minded people.
Your car will turn off at the sign for the School for Disabled Children (like most signs here, it's hand-painted) then, past a volleyball court, you'll come to a two-storey, baby-blue, wooden building with a sign (hand-painted) that proclaims it the Ministry of Environment, Lands and Agricultural Development.
Inside, two roomy offices are separated by a glass partition and mercifully cooled by a potent air conditioner. Out of the second one emerges a handsome man in his 50s. His name is Tukabu Teroroko and he's smiling broadly, because he has one of sexiest jobs around: managing the birth of the world's largest marine area.
The Phoenix Islands Protected Area will be the size of California, the first that protects tuna and other ocean-going fish and the first to get funding using market-based mechanisms.
It doesn't hurt that the Phoenix Islands just happen to contain some of the last of the world's pristine coral reefs, and that the region has the potential to become a tourist Mecca – an underwater Serengeti whose teeming fish populations will put Australia's Great Barrier Reef to shame (where commercial fishing is banned in only 30 per cent).
On the wall of Teroroko's office are nine stunning underwater photos of the Phoenix Islands' marine wildlife, taken by a National Geographic pro.
Over a series of conversations, Teroroko explains just why he's passionate about this project. "We're fulfilling God's will to have us look after his Creation," says Teroroko, a devout Catholic who has had audiences with two popes – John Paul II and Benedict XVI – and has the pictures to prove it perched high on his living room wall.
For science, he says, the reserve will serve as a sort of 'Noah's Ark' – insurance against the depletion of marine life that seems to be accelerating everywhere else.
It will also allow the study of the effects of global warming on one of the few places humans haven't otherwise interfered with because it's so remote. Finally, it will create tourism jobs for the I-Kiribati, some of the poorest people in the world (though also among the happiest, it seems).
HOW THE PHOENIX ISLANDS reserve came to be is a tale combining serendipity, talent and persistence. The eight islands were never permanently populated by Polynesians, but they were successively mined by the U.S. for seabird guano and used by British companies to grow coconuts.
Canton, the largest, served as a base for Pan Am's glorious Clipper seaplanes before World War II, as a hub for military Pacific aviation during the war and as a refueling station for Qantas and Pan Am's wheeled aircraft afterward.
Then it hosted a NASA base to track the Mercury space program and, finally, a U.S. Air Force station until 1978, the year the Phoenix were folded together with the Gilbert and the Line islands into the state of Kiribati.
Repeated attempts to colonise them, with the aim of alleviating overpopulation in Tarawa failed because the rainfall was insufficient. By 2000, "we had no development plan for the Phoenix Islands," recalled Tebwe Letaake, the environment minister's deputy.
But the large swaths of waters between the islands were prized by long-liners fishing for yellowfin and bigeye tuna. Purse-seiners were hauling in thousands of tonnes of skipjack and juvenile yellowfin tuna for canning. According to scientists, this contributed to the steady decrease of tuna stocks.
These international fishers paid US$26 million (A$27.5 million) to use the country's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a seaborne area over which a state has special rights over the exploration and use of marine resources. The Phoenix Islands region represents 11.7 per cent of Kiribati's EEZ.
In 2000, Greg Stone, a scientist with the New England Aquarium in Boston, USA, was invited to join an exploratory cruise of the Phoenix aboard the Nai'a, a luxury, 36-metre motorsailer. "What we found was amazing," he says. "We'd never seen so many fish before."
Because of their isolation in the central Pacific, the Phoenix had escaped the ravages of the shark-finning vessels, which pull up sharks, slice off their fins and throw them back into water to die, then sell the dried fins to China. The islands' distance from any airport also immunised them against the live reef fish trade. And the absence of people meant the tastiest reef fish were left undisturbed.
After that first cruise, Stone flew to Tarawa with an illustrated report. "The book caused quite a sensation," recalled Teroroko, the project director who was then deputy to the fisheries minister. "We were all very surprised and impressed at how much life there was."
Stone asked the fisheries minister at the time, Tetabo Nakara, if Kiribati would consider protecting the islands. "I told Stone it was a great idea, but we'd have to get compensated for the money from the fishing licenses," Nakara recalled. "I said we'd have to invent a reverse fishing license, and the term stuck."
Stone returned to the islands in 2002 with a National Geographic team, which produced a movie that was shown the following year to an increasingly enthusiastic political elite in Tarawa. Along with the movie (which can be seen on www.phoenixislands.org), Stone brought with him several staffers from Conservation International (CI) in Washington DC, one of the world's wealthiest environmental groups, who told the officials they were ready to make up for any financial shortfall.
In 2005, a memorandum of understanding was signed: Kiribati would gradually end all exploitation of the Phoenix Islands, and Conservation International along with the New England Aquarium, would help them: CI would finance a trust fund, while the aquarium would design the marine protected area and help the government manage it. And so, the Phoenix Islands Protected Area was declared in 2006.
Meanwhile, Teroroko was made director of the newly protected area, with his salary and budget paid by the U.S. conservation group. In late 2007, Nakara, a vigorous promoter of the project, was provided with four possible sizes for the reserve. He recalled with a proud grin, "I chose the largest." It was more than 400,000 km2.
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.
