("artificial reefs")

[Helmut ZIBROWIUS]

>The challenge being the 15 or so hulks (coasters, shrimp trawlers etc...)
>that are sitting in Dar es Salaam harbour providing considerable
>navigational, environmental and social hazards. The idea is to develop a
>win-win solution to remove the hulks and create a new habitat for
>fish/recreation/coastal protection/whatever.


Once on the seabottom they are away, no longer to be seen (with residues of
fuel in the tanks, etc. & whatever) It's cheaper to run them on ground than
to recycle them. "Artificial reefs" of car carcasses had locally been
fashionable in the Mediterranean. (Well, iron ship hulls will not rust away
as fast as cars and there is some chance that part gets covered by coral
growth before totally falling into rust.)

Same consideration (cheaper than recycling) for oil platforms. But it does
not need to be presented in such a crude way. There is the CITES argument
since
a bunch of bureaucrates put the whole order of Scleractinia on a CITES
list. Hence a North Sea platform colonized by Lophelia deserves to be
preserved as the vital substrate of a protected species (recent paper in
Nature). Then there are the platforms in the tropics colonized by Tubstraea
....

Helmut ZIBROWIUS
(Centre d'Oceanologie de Marseille)
Station Marine d'Endoume
Rue Batterie des Lions
13007 Marseille / France
E-MAIL:  hzibrowi at com.univ-mrs.fr
TEL: within France  0491041624  from abroad  +33  491041624
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