[Coral-List] A reply about many recent topics on Coral List: SCTLD; Diadema and hogfishes

Tue May 30 16:50:56 UTC 2023

Hi Mark, Doug, Mike et al:

You are correct in that the last sentence in my last post was cynical and rhetorical. Further to Doug’s post after mine, my comment about ecotourism etc had nothing to do with the number of divers attracted to coral reefs by ecotourism. My comment was simply about the misguided downfall of thinking that attracting humans and more and more humans to live and party near coral reefs (or any other ecosystem one is concerned about) could be a good thing. As Pogo said many decades ago “We have met the enemy, and he is us” (https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/). Building lodgings and other attractions, employing thousands of people to care for the tourists, feeding all these people (contributing to local and not so local overfishing as Mark pointed out), transportation, etc etc etc… were supposed to be OK as long as they diverted locals from overfishing nearby reefs and providing alternate sources of income. But that just isn’t how it works. Take a look at the Mayan Riviera as just one example. The human species is prone to excess when it comes to making money.

And the poor divers get blamed for everything which is pretty silly. As for divers being the means of spreading of diseases such as SCTLD, I would counter that for every diver there are 10s of thousands of marine invertebrates and fishes that swim among and actively touch the corals that are much more likely vectors for disease. Little work has been done on this because it would be almost impossible to track and for many of the diseases the infectious agents are still unknown. Consider all the little crustaceans and polychaetes and mollusks that clamber among the corals. Or the corallivorous inverts that feed on the corals and were found to spread a disease by Margaret Miller’s group down in Key Largo. Clumsy divers can certainly mangle a few corals; the GBR decided to sacrifice a few reefs to diving/snorkeling tourists and keep such activities away from most reefs, which sounds like a cautiously reasonable approach, but I don’t know how that’s worked out in the long run. My underwater observations is that discarded fishing gear of many kinds is doing more damage to corals, sponges and gorgonians that the divers.

With regard to the Diadema die-off being the cause for fewer and smaller hogfish… well… hogwash. It was the spearfishermen who reduced the number of larger hogfish and similar invertivore fishes starting back in the 1950s not the almost demise of Diadema. I recall from Puerto Rico in the 1960s that hogfish and other invertivorous fishes (e.g. trunkfishes; triggerfishes) were large and abundant as seen by the fishes being cleaned by the fishermen at the docks. As time went on, fewer fishes and smaller fishes, no surprise. This happened in concert with more fishermen and more humans wanting to eat these fishes; for example, a proliferation of seafood restaurants in La Parguera from maybe 2-3 in early 1960s to a dozen or more now (or at least before covid). And now they don’t serve local fish either. One of the most popular fishes in Puerto Rico used to be ‘chapin’ Lactophrys bicaudalis. Large filets were prepared breaded and fried (filete de chapin empanado) was among the most popular dishes in seafood restaurants all over Puerto Rico, home to 2-3 million people plus millions of tourists. Empanadas de chapin were sold everywhere! I confess it was one of my favorite fish dishes. Then the rumor had it that who knows what fish was used in the empanadas (seasoning covered up any distinctive fish flavor) and no more breaded filets anywhere. About 10 years ago I ate at a seafood restaurant south of Mayaguez and they had chapin on the menu. I was doubtful and surprised so I ordered it. What I got was a plate with 4-5 tiny 10 cm splayed fishes, and I felt really, really bad! So while I am sure that there were fewer Diadema around for all these fishes to eat that was more than made up for by the increasing fishing pressure over the 2-3 decades after the Diadema die-off hit the area. Diadema are back in growing numbers, but not the fishes because fishing pressure is as high as ever. High fishing pressure can select for sexual maturity at smaller size as has been shown for many fishery species, so no surprise.

To circle back to my favorite topic, human overpopulation can be pointed to as the cause of coral reef decline no matter what angle you come from. Once again: “We have met the enemy, and he is us”

P.S. I have been watching the new “Secrets of the elephants” series Nat Geo and the message is clear: we are wiping out this incredible species; rainforest elephants are CRITICALLY ENDANGERED as well so many of Africa’s megafauna due to poaching, and habitat loss to growing human populations taking over the land and human conflicts so it’s not just coral reefs.

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From: Mark Tupper <mark.tupper at port.ac.uk>
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2023 3:48 AM
To: Douglas Fenner <douglasfennertassi at gmail.com>
Cc: Alina Szmant <alina at cisme-instruments.com>; Phillip Dustan <phil.dustan at gmail.com>; coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Help Us Understand the Beauty of Coral Reefs

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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto:phil.dustan at gmail.com>>
Cc: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov<mailto: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<mailto: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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