[Coral-List] Mixed Messages
Douglas Fenner
douglasfennertassi at gmail.com
Wed Jul 31 22:48:05 UTC 2019
Mike,
Some people say that X% of the world's reefs are irreversibly
damaged. I think that's not been demonstrated. Where have we removed all
of the damaging effects of humans to see if the reefs can recover? Few if
any places. So I agree with your point about very few places where
nutrient pollution has been removed, and when it has, recovery has happened
(but probably only if there aren't other major ongoing impacts there from
humans).
I think that nutrients are widely recognized to be be damaging for
coral reefs. "Reefs at Risk" evaluated the major local threats on reefs by
mapping them worldwide, and watershed-based pollution (including nutrients)
was one of the few things they mapped. Every time NOAA (U.S. National
Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) coral reef program calls for
applications for conservation grants on coral reefs, nutrients is one of
the things that qualifies. A paper that evaluated the various threats to
coral reefs (Brainard et al, 2013, Table 1) ranked nutrients as one of the
higher threats (number 6 out of 19, African dust was rated 18, diver damage
and sunscreens were not listed). It is, however, true that there are a
fair number of people who think that herbivory is more important, but there
are plenty of people who think both are very important.
I don't see recognition of the problem as the major stumbling block; I
see inaction as the major stumbling block. And it is the major stumbling
block for all the major threats to coral reef ecosystems. There have only
been 4 real "stock assessments" of coral reef fish, all in US waters, and
to my knowledge not a single one has lead to any management action to
correct overfishing of those species that are overfished. Yes, MPAs are
widespread, but effectively enforced MPAs are a much rarer thing. People
in the Florida Keys rioted in the streets and burnt an administrator in
effigy at the mere proposal of slightly increasing a tiny area of no-take
in the Florida Keys. Most places sediments are not controlled, some places
they've virtually killed the reef flats completely (such as south side of
Molokai (Field et al, 2011) and some places around Lanai, Hawaii). We know
how to take corrective action. Why isn't it taken?? Because there are
people who benefit the actions that produce these impacts, and because
reducing the impacts either constrains their actions and thus reduces their
benefits, or because it costs a LOT of money. My understanding is that
sewage systems are being installed in the Florida Keys. I also understand
it is costing a LOT of money, correct me if I'm wrong. A lot of countries
don't have that kind of money. The world's societies, and their
governments, have not taken enough action, provided enough money, to take
effective action. Taxpayers don't want to be taxed to do it, fishermen
don't want to be restricted, people building houses or moving into areas
don't want to be restricted, developers don't want to be restricted,
farmers don't want to be restricted on how much fertilizer they use or what
land they clear, loggers don't want to be restricted, etc etc, etc.
I suspect that lots of people would be willing to change what they do
to reduce impacts if someone could show them how they could reduce impacts
on reefs without losing the benefits they derive from their activities that
impact reefs. That is far easier to say than to do. Which I see as the
crux of our problem.
Cheers, Doug
Brainard et al 2013. Incorporating climate and ocean change into
extinction risk assessments for 82 coral species. Conservation Biology 27:
1169-1178. try Google Scholar
Field, et al 2011. Rising sea level may cause decline of fringing coral
reefs. EOS 92 (33): 273-280.
Try Google Scholar
On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 3:15 AM Risk, Michael <riskmj at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> Doug:
>
> Too long.
>
> I would remind -listers that there have been (as far as I know) only two
> studies of what happens to a reef when the water is cleaned up: Kaneohe Bay
> Hawaii, and Worthing Barbados. In both cases, recovery surely an aspect of
> "resilience") was rapid.
>
> The interesting (and depressing) aspect of this is, why has the coral reef
> biological community been so slow to accept the impacts of land-based
> stresses? The reluctance sometimes reaches heroic proportions. In previous
> discussion on this thread, when Steve asked how to reconcile the paper
> showing bleaching on the GBR and Brian's 30-year Looe Key work, some
> bright spark suggested that the GBR work covered a huge area, whereas Brian
> looked only at Looe Key. As though Looe Key were the only spot in the
> world's oceans where N enrichment has occurred. (And I point out that the
> monitoring on the GBR is incapable of detecting land-based stresses-see
> Reef Encounter, 1988.)
>
> Due to a lot of foot-dragging, we have been deprived of a crucial
> experiment: how will healthy coral ecosystems survive global warming?
>
> In 2002, Gardner et al showed us that the Caribbean had lost >1/2 its
> coral by 1980. Recent Florida efforts emphasize transplanting corals,
> without tackling WQ issues. Ten years ago I said (MPB Editorial):
>
> "I will digress here a moment to lament the current state of coral
> reef science politics. Somehow, we are led to believe that, out of
> all the ecosystems on the planet, reefs are the ONLY ones not affected
> by nutrients (Szmant, 2002). Some of this debate is no doubt
> truly driven by responsible people going where the data lead, but a
> cynic might note the confluence of development money and political
> pressure with the willingness of suits to say it’s OK to dump/
> dredge/clear/whatever, because it’s all grazing and overfishing."
> ________________________________________
> From: Coral-List [coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov] on behalf of
> Douglas Fenner via Coral-List [coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov]
> Sent: July 29, 2019 6:49 PM
> To: Steve Mussman
> Cc: coral list
> Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Mixed Messages
>
> I think it is an open empirical question whether reducing local
> impacts improves resilience. One confusion may be due to the definition of
> the word "resilience." Some people have used "resilience" to mean both
> resistance to being killed and ability to recover. Others have used
> "resistance" to refer to being killed and "resilience" to ability to
> recover. Might be an important distinction. It could be that local
> impacts have little or no effect on whether hot water kills corals or not.
> Evidence is strong that if the water gets hot enough, they die even in
> places with essentially no human local impacts (northern Great Barrier
> Reef, Scott Reef in NW Australia, Chagos, Jarvis (remote US Pacific island)
> etc). Might be that local impacts have a huge effect on whether corals can
> recover. Nearly no local impacts and they recover (such as Scott Reef and
> Chagos), and heavy impacts no recovery (Discovery Bay, Jamaica, 40 years
> later). Or maybe that's not the solution to the question, empirical
> question, important question.
> My thought is that this title ("biggest threat to coral reefs") was on
> the popular article, not on the original, scientific article, it is not the
> fault of the authors of the scientific article unless they provided the
> idea that poor water quality is the greatest threat to coral reefs to the
> popular article writer (which I don't know to be the case, and I know that
> popular article writers have to have an attention-grabbing title to pull
> readers in, so I assume it was their idea).
> If the popular article had said that poor water quality was the
> biggest threat to Florida reefs, that may well be true. My impression was
> that coral disease was the proximate cause of the death of most Florida
> corals. But as the writers of this scientific article point out, nutrients
> have been documented to exacerbate coral diseases. So maybe nutrients are
> the ultimate cause of the Florida coral deaths. And could well be same or
> similar for the Caribbean, I suppose. But for the world's coral reefs? I
> don't think so, especially threat ifor the future. Mind you, the
> documented decline in Florida and the Caribbean is greater than in most of
> the Indo-Pacific.
> Nutrients are widely considered to be one of the greatest threats to
> coral reefs. Reducing nutrients from humans is obviously a very good thing
> to do, vital in many places, particularly Florida. No dispute there. But
> many of us think that global warming causing bleaching is the greatest
> future threat to the world's corals as a whole. At the same time, other,
> local threats can have great impacts locally, and we must act on them as
> well as climate change, and locally the local threats are about all
> individuals can reduce. But we must get global warming under control or
> the world's corals are going to be mostly dead from bleaching if they
> weren't already killed by disease, nutrients, sediment, overfishing, etc
> etc etc.
> Cheers, Doug
>
> On Mon, Jul 29, 2019 at 2:52 AM Steve via Coral-List <
> coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
>
> >
> > I’ve received a number of interesting responses to my inquiry and that
> > leads me to attempt to clarify a few things. As far as points of
> contention
> > in the two papers I cited, what I find most complexing are the somewhat
> > incompatible references to the effects of water quality. One paper
> suggests
> > that if water quality improved, resilience would be enhanced while the
> > other points out that there was “no sign of bleaching protection where
> > water quality was high”. While I’m sure that the dynamics can vary from
> one
> > reef to another, this seems to be a critical point with universal
> > implications. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were determined that every
> reef
> > reacts somewhat differently to a whole host of what must be, at least to
> > some extent, unique and asymmetrical threats.
> >
> > To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the waters are being muddied
> > intentionally. The data should lead you wherever it does, but what I am
> > implying is that we have to mindful of the fact that in today’s world
> > swayed by sound bites and social media, even the most rigorous scientific
> > findings can be spun, even unintentionally, by seemingly innocuous
> > headlines like this:
> >
> https://www.earth.com/video/poor-water-quality-may-be-the-biggest-threat-to-coral-reefs/
> > Does it matter if water quality, plastic pollution or sunscreens are
> hyped
> > intermittently as the greatest threat to coral reefs? Maybe yes, maybe
> no,
> > but I do know how hard it is to break through on climate change. Right
> now
> > my concern is that just when we seem to be gaining traction on perhaps
> the
> > most challenging of issues I react with trepidation to anything that
> could
> > cause even delusory momentum headed in the right direction to suddenly
> slip
> > away.
> >
> > Steve
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Coral-List mailing list
> > Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> > https://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/mailman/listinfo/coral-list
>
>
>
> --
> Douglas Fenner
> Ocean Associates, Inc. Contractor
> NOAA Fisheries Service
> Pacific Islands Regional Office
> Honolulu
> and:
> Consultant
> PO Box 7390
> Pago Pago, American Samoa 96799 USA
>
> A call to climate action (Science editorial)
>
> https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6443/807?utm_campaign=toc_sci-mag_2019-05-30&et_rid=17045989&et_cid=2840296
>
> New book "The Uninhabitable Earth" First sentence: "It is much, much worse
> than you think."
> Read first (short) chapter open access:
>
> https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/read-a-chapter-from-the-uninhabitable-earth-a-dire-warning-on-climate-change
>
> Want a Green New Deal? Here's a better one.
>
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-a-green-new-deal-heres-a-better-one/2019/02/24/2d7e491c-36d2-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html?utm_term=.a3fc8337cbf8
> _______________________________________________
> Coral-List mailing list
> Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> https://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/mailman/listinfo/coral-list
>
--
Douglas Fenner
Ocean Associates, Inc. Contractor
NOAA Fisheries Service
Pacific Islands Regional Office
Honolulu
and:
Consultant
PO Box 7390
Pago Pago, American Samoa 96799 USA
A call to climate action (Science editorial)
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6443/807?utm_campaign=toc_sci-mag_2019-05-30&et_rid=17045989&et_cid=2840296
New book "The Uninhabitable Earth" First sentence: "It is much, much worse
than you think."
Read first (short) chapter open access:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/read-a-chapter-from-the-uninhabitable-earth-a-dire-warning-on-climate-change
Want a Green New Deal? Here's a better one.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-a-green-new-deal-heres-a-better-one/2019/02/24/2d7e491c-36d2-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html?utm_term=.a3fc8337cbf8
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