[Coral-List] Help Us Understand the Beauty of Coral Reefs

Mon May 29 07:47:40 UTC 2023

Hi Doug,

I understood Alina's final question to be rhetorical, but perhaps I
misinterpreted it.

It's difficult to compare Coron and Cozumel as they are vastly different in
terms of economy and infrastructure. The fact that Cozumel has been
developing for decades and actually has a sewage treatment plant, and one
that is properly sited away from the reefs, puts it in a different league
from Coron.  Raw sewage is piped unto Coron Bay and the fecal coliform
counts are unsafe for swimming, let alone corals. Coron also has high
freshwater and sediment input from numerous waterways and runoff. Coron
does not have a strong current constantly flushing the reefs like Cozumel
does.

Another site in the Philippines, Nonoc Island, is flushed by a very strong
current through the narrow strait that connects the Pacific Ocean to the
Visayan Sea. The current runs fast enough at mid-tide to create maelstroms
that are hazardous to small craft. Nonoc has a major nickel laterite mine
on its eastern shore which releases toxic tailings and sediment into the
sea. The southern shore is directly across the strait from Surigao City, a
city of a quarter million that emits sewage and other pollutants. Despite
this, Nonoc's fringing reefs are healthy and vibrant (albeit overfished),
no doubt because of the extreme tidal flushing.

Most of the references you posted are about physical damage directly caused
by divers. That is the least of our problems. It was not SCUBA diving per
se that caused the demise of Coron's reefs, it was the rapid and haphazard
development that occurred after Coron was "discovered". The same thing that
happened to Boracay, Panglao, Phuket, Phi Phi Islands, Koh Samui, and
hundreds of other popular destinations. Developers swoop in and start
building, and by the time local or national governments are able to enact
legislation to control the development and its environmental impacts, the
damage is done and the reefs are degraded or dead. Coron is hardly a
one-off situation.

The fate of the reefs at any popular dive destination will depend on a
plethora of factors, including the environmental and oceanographic context,
the rate of development, the institutional capacity to enact and enforce
planning and legislation, and the resources and infrastructure to mitigate
the impacts of coastal development. Because many of the best reef sites are
in  developing nations, the pace of development tends to be rapid,  and the
capacity and resources to manage that development are often lacking.

Cheers,
Mark

On Mon, 29 May 2023, 04:45 Douglas Fenner, <douglasfennertassi at gmail.com>
wrote:

>     I think Alina's final question is a good one.  A quick search in
> Google Scholar on "effects of diving on coral reefs review" produced the
> following references to review articles on this topic (I've just read
> abstracts, and small parts of these):
> A Review of SCUBA Diving Impacts and Implication for Coral Reefs
> Conservation and Tourism Management
> Siti Zulaiha Zainal Abidin and Badaruddin Mohamed
> SHS Web of Conferences, 12 (2014) 01093
>
> Sumanapala, D., Dimmock, K., & Wolf, I. D. (2022). A review of ecological
> impacts from recreational SCUBA diving: Current evidence and future
> practice. *Tourism and Hospitality Research*, *0*(0).
>
> Vinicius J. Giglio, Osmar J. Luiz, Carlos E.L. Ferreira,
> Ecological impacts and management strategies for recreational diving: A
> review,
> Journal of Environmental Management, Volume 256, 2020, 109949
>
> Roche et al, 2016. Recreational diving impacts on coral reefs and the
> adoption of environmentally responsible within the scuba diving industry.
> Environmental Management 58: 107-116.
>
> Roche cites 3 papers that reported less coral cover on more heavily dived
> sites than on less dived sites.
> Giglio cites 2 papers that reported "high levels" of reef damage at places
> with intensive diving.
>
>     I don't think all the world's coral reef diving impacts are the same
> as Mark described from one spot in the Philippines.  My experience in
> Cozumel, where diving has long been intense, was not like that at all.
> Cozumel had 2000 dives per year on 15 miles of reef.  Some papers have
> recommended no more than about 6000 dives a year, but that may be on a
> single dive site, I haven't looked at the source papers to check that.  I
> haven't been back for over 20 years, and I'm told that corals have declined
> there some and sponges increased, but if that's all that has happened, it
> may be in better shape than Florida and most of the Caribbean, judging by
> reports.  That said, Cozumel had as a major advantage that the town and all
> the hotels were well north of the reefs where the diving was, and the
> Yucatan current moves briskly along the reefs going from south to north.
> The sewage plant I was told was well north of town, so that effluent was
> carried away from the reefs.  The island is semi-consolidated carbonate
> sand, extremely porous, there is no surface water, little soil, and no
> agriculture so terrestrial sedimentation is not a problem.  The reefs are
> all protected and it appeared that there was essentially no poaching, and
> those reefs have some of the world's highest reef fish biomass in spite of
> not being so remote that people can't get to them (but sharks are rare).
> So Cozumel is quite unusual.  I've commented before that Cozumel corals
> showed recovery over time following Hurricane Gilbert, in spite of the fact
> that the reefs had heavy diving traffic.  To me, that suggests that it is
> at least POSSIBLE for diving to have a lower impact than hurricanes (the
> damage Gilbert did to Cozumel's diving reefs was not very great, since
> waves on the west side of Cozumel where the reefs are had limited space to
> build (called "fetch") between there and the Yucatan Peninsula.  Gilbert's
> waves were about 7 feet tall on the west shore of Cozumel and 40 feet high
> on the east coast I was told.)
>
>    Obviously, the effects of dive tourism are not just from the diving
> itself, but can be from nutrients and sediments and fishing, and other
> things.  If restaurants serve fresh reef fish, then even if they don't come
> from the local reefs they come from reefs and the impact is just not on the
> local reefs.  And the flights to get to remote reefs add to climate change
> problems just as all tourism and business and family visit and other types
> of flights do.
>
>   How are popular dive locations that are heavily dived doing compared to
> similar places which have light if any diving?  Trends would be most
> useful, I would think, since diving is often most intense on some of the
> best reef.  We can't always assume that a heavily dived reef and a lightly
> dived reef started out the same before the diving, but trends can help us
> figure it out.
>
> Cheers, Doug
>
> On Sun, May 28, 2023 at 4:06 AM Alina Szmant via Coral-List <
> coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
>
>> Hello Mark:
>>
>> In 1993 I helped Bob Ginsburg with the Global Aspects of corals Reefs:
>> Health, Hazards and History colloquium he organized at the University of
>> Miami.  Researchers came from all over and presented their case studies.
>> On the 3rd day of the Colloquium there was a session about measures and
>> policies that could be used to help save coral reefs and ecotourism was
>> applauded by many as the solution for a number of reasons.  I clearly
>> recall feeling alarmed at the prospect of millions of people flocking to
>> thousands of hotels built along 100s of km of coral reef coastline and
>> spoke out against the concept. Boy was I shot down. The economics of
>> developing coral reef ecotourism to help all of the poor people living near
>> coral reefs won the day!!! This was going to help prevent overfishing the
>> nearby reefs because the locals would have have new ways of making a living
>> rather than depending on coral reefs for food, barter goods and building
>> materials.
>>
>>  How did that work out for coral reefs?????
>>
>>
>>
>> Dr. Alina M. Szmant,  CEO
>> CISME Instruments LLC
>>
>>
>>
>> -------- Original message --------
>> From: Mark Tupper via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
>> Date: 5/27/23 5:05 PM (GMT-05:00)
>> To: Phillip Dustan <phil.dustan at gmail.com>
>> Cc: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
>> Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Help Us Understand the Beauty of Coral Reefs
>>
>> Phil, you hit it on the head. People are more likely to exploit what they
>> love than protect it. Beautiful reefs, beaches, etc draw people like a
>> magnet, leading to hotels, restaurants, dive shops, glass-bottom boat
>> tours, increased fishing pressure to support said hotels and restaurants,
>> sewage, plastic and other debris, and habitat destruction from coastal
>> development.
>>
>> I watched this happen over a decade in Coron, Philippines. When I started
>> surveys there in 2007, there were 3 hotels, a handful of tour operators,
>> and maybe 30 cars on the island. By 2017, there were 53 hotels, several
>> dozen tour operators, and about 3500 cars. The nearby reefs in Coron Bay
>> that were stunning in 2007 were mostly trashed by 2017. I had to travel at
>> least an hour to find healthy reefs with decent fish biomass.
>>
>> This same pattern is repeated globally. Coron is just one of many sites
>> that has been "loved to death". Not to sound too flippant, but perhaps we
>> should portray reefs as dangerous, nasty, scary places so people leave
>> them
>> alone.
>>
>> Mark
>>
>> On Sat, 27 May 2023, 12:02 Phillip Dustan via Coral-List, <
>> coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
>>
>> >  I Agree. I was a co-author on this paper. My photo time-series of
>> > Carysfort Reef were used to help validate the algorithm.
>> > https://biospherefoundation.org/project/coral-reef-change/
>> >
>> > However, there is a greater logical flaw in your thinking. For years the
>> > mantra has been "People only protect what they love"
>> > Cousteau popularized the idea and he always believed that it worked but
>> I
>> > think it is fair to say that the current state of affairs is that either
>> > people do not love reefs or the idea is false.
>> > Everyone treats coral reefs as a resource that provides goods and
>> services
>> > to humans when in fact reefs need all their productivity to maintain
>> > themselves.
>> > Reefs are living processes and that is what makes them beautiful to
>> humans,
>> > a healthy reef glows with life.
>> > This can be quantified with image processing but that does not seem to
>> add
>> > to their conservation unfortunately.
>> > Guess they need more than the perception of love to be allowed to exist
>> in
>> > the Anthropocene..........
>> > Phil
>> >
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