[Coral-List] SCTLD has reached Bonaire
Douglas Fenner
douglasfennertassi at gmail.com
Mon Aug 1 00:17:36 UTC 2022
Abstract: diving is one of the most minor threats to the world's coral
reefs, except for a few tiny areas like the Florida reefs.
Phil,
Your post fits with a view I've had for some time, that
conservation-minded scuba divers like to beat themselves up for all the
damage they do on reefs. Damage from divers and snorkelers are well
documented In small areas of intensive diving. But diving is not
widespread throughout the world's reefs, it is concentrated in some spots.
Florida stands out, it has tiny coral reefs, tiny compared to the "hard
ground" area south of Miami to Key West and a bit beyond. I don't work on
Florida reefs, and I've never lived there, though I dove a few reefs there
once and saw just how tiny some are. But my impression is that there are
considerable differences of opinion, based on evidence, about the cause of
the decline of Florida's reefs, and one major contender is water quality, I
would think that coral disease is highly likely to be another major
contributor to the decline, and probably climate change as well (including
documented bleaching in 2005).
Can you please point us to published, peer-reviewed literature that
documents that diving is a major cause of decline of coral reefs
worldwide, or perhaps just in Florida?
Second, I get the impression that some people working in Florida
have not been to other reefs, particularly maybe not to Indo-Pacific
reefs. You could lose Florida reefs in the Caribbean easily. You could
lose the entire Caribbean in the Indo-Pacific, particularly if the reefs
were spread out. By spread out, I remind that the Indo-Pacific extends
from the east coast of Africa and the Red Sea, two-thirds the way around
the globe to Pacific Panama. Reefs are not all the same. Things true
about Florida are probably not true in all of the Caribbean, and certainly
are not for much or most or all of the Indo-Pacific. And the Indo-Pacific
is the BIG game for coral reefs. I remind that ALMOST ALL species in the
Indo-Pacific are different from those in Florida and the Caribbean. The
reefs of Florida and the Caribbean are well documented to have declined,
and declined much more than many of the rest of the world's reefs, which
are in fact the vast majority of the world's reefs. Australia and
Indonesia each have 16% of the world's reefs and the Philippines has 8%,
and those 3 countries have the three largest reef areas of any country in
the world. The USA is way down that list, I've forgotten how far down, and
a majority of the US coral reef area is in the Pacific. I would even guess
that the majority of the US reef area in the Western Atlantic is not in
Florida, there is probably more in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Is than in
Florida.
Add to that, the fact that although the decline of coral reefs in
many parts of the world has been documented far beyond any doubt,
monitoring results, as I pointed out in a previous email, document that the
impression many people have that all the world's reefs are in terrible
shape now, is JUST NOT TRUE. That does NOT mean that the reports of
decline were incorrect or lies, far from it. A good illustration is the
Great Barrier Reef, which is relatively well studied. Reports of mass
bleaching, including mass coral mortality that it has produced, have been
published for the Great Barrier Reef, and they are true. BUT, mass
mortality doesn't mean the coral populations will stay down forever. Look
at the AIMS (Australian Institute of Marine Science) monitoring results for
the Great Barrier Reef. They show drastic declines for the north and south
sections. Fact. But hang on and look at the graph of the full curves over
time, and realize that both of those sections have recovered to where they
were before disturbances (including mass bleaching) caused those declines.
News headlines around the world reported on the death of vast amounts of
coral, but no news organization heralded their recovery (disaster news
sells, recovery news does not). Net effect, everybody thinks the world's
reefs are all dead. NOT TRUE. It's not even true that most of the world's
reefs are mostly dead. We, as scientists, have a duty to report the actual
evidence, "good, bad, or ugly" as the saying goes.
Does that mean that coral reefs are not in trouble??? NO way,
their future is still highly threatened, death of reefs in the future is
highly likely, the intensity and frequency of bleaching events continues to
increase, land-based pollution and fishing are increasing, etc. Does it
mean that there are no reefs in the world that have failed to recover???
Quite the contrary, Florida reefs and most of the Caribbean have never
recovered from their loses. I believe some reefs in the Indian Ocean have
not recovered from the 1998 El Nino mass coral bleaching mortality, about
half didn't (Graham et al, 2015). I was in Chagos in 2014, and can vouch
for seeing quite a bit of coral there, hardly all dead, quite a bit
of recovery since 1998. It has been hit badly again, and we all hope it
will recover again, but in the future the mortality will come so often it
is very unlikely to be able to recover.
Anyhow, I always recommend to people who work in the Indo-Pacific
to go dive in the Caribbean and/or Florida if you get a chance, and vice
versa. They share almost NO species, which shows that the existence of
coral reef ecosystems does not depend on any one species.
The vast majority of the world's coral reef ecosystem area gets
extremely low rates of diving. To make a guess based on no hard numerical
data, I'll bet that the average number of dives per square mile of the
world's coral reefs is probably less than one diver per square mile per
year. The distribution is extremely skewed, a few reefs, like those in
Florida, get vast numbers of divers per unit area, nearly every day of the
year. When I dove in Florida at Looe Key Reef, our dive boat had to wait
for another dive boat to untie from a mooring buoy so we could tie up to
dive. The tiny reef was crawling with divers. Cozumel used to get 2000
dives a day on reef that is 15 miles long and maybe 100 feet wide, about
300 days a year. And MOST of the world's reefs get almost zero dives per
YEAR. All you have to do is get out into Indo-Pacific reef systems and
take a look at a map and realize the vast area of reefs around you, many
with very few people and no dive shops or tourists, and it sinks in.
That's not a bad thing, is it??
Yes, diving can have impacts on very small, high-value reef
areas. And trying to reduce those impacts is not a bad thing to do at
all. BUT if you've seen what a powerful hurricane can do, or a mass
bleaching event can do, diver damage pales in comparison. It also pales in
comparison to what fishing does to reefs. If you ever get to a place that
has had no fishing, you'll see what I mean, it is like a different world,
swarming with fish, especially sharks. And if you get outside the tiny
area that has loads of divers, the diver damage becomes minuscule if there
is any at all.
Diver damage is not in the list of top 10 threats to the world's
coral reefs, might not even be in the top 20.
Cheers, Doug
Graham, N. A. J., Jennings, S., MacNeil, M. A., Mouillot, D., Wilson, S. K.
2015.
Predicting climate-driven regime shifts versus rebound potential in
coral reefs.
*Nature* 518: 94-97.
On Fri, Jul 29, 2022 at 4:44 AM Phillip Dustan via Coral-List <
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
> I find this thread full of magical fantastical denial supplemented with
> romantic reminiscing about the old days and where did all the wonderful
> reefs go?
> While the “scientific community” is searching for the mythical causative
> agent(s) and the “conservationists” have been hawking sustainable blue
> economic development, all have ignored the face that the dive industry is
> a form if massive destructive economic extractive development that “mines
> nature” for money. The industry has pushed into more and morrb remote reefs
> touting their pristine qualities. Skin Diver Magazine now mimiced by DAN
> Diver Alert promoted bucket list diving in more remote locales as the
> local dive sites degraded…..
> Well, now there are almost no more intact reefs. Magical thinking by
> agencies, ngos, and “scientists” talk of reef restoration as the answer….
> When will we realize that the Blue Economy is also magical and destructive
> thinking unless the rules of ecology are obeyed. Andre the Giant knew it.
> It’s not rocket science. It’s just not as profitable. It does not create
> income to resorts, liveaboards, fund labs and graduate student projects or
> PI summer salary. But coral reefs will continue to degrade until we accept
> the fact that the very adaptations that have allowed for the evolutions of
> these marvelous systems make them vulnerable to humans . Coral reefs are
> not things, they are emergent processes governed by the “rules” of ecology
> and evolution overseen by the Red Queen. All the machinations of Noah, Dan,
> Padi, and the Bingos will never be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again
> because their magical thinking and hubris got us here.
> Technology and all the monitoring in the world cannot restore the required
> ecological conditions that have been destroyed. You all got to dig deeper
> and deal with the well-know basics Gaian principles as outlined by the
> recent James Lovelock or the reefs will all be toast.
> Places like Vietnam will are absolutely justified to close their reefs to
> diving tourism/terrorism.
>
> Phil
>
> On Fri, Jul 29, 2022 at 09:53 Steve Mussman via Coral-List <
> coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > We recently discussed the closure of a reef in Vietnam to divers in an
> > attempt to reduce stress. They are temporarily closing some reefs in
> > Cozumel as well.
> >
> > Now, Bonaire has closed a popular dive spot (Karpata) in an attempt to
> > contain SCTLD which has just recently been detected there.
> >
> > Any thoughts on the effectiveness of this strategy and what do we know at
> > this point about how the disease spreads?
> >
> > Bonaire has managed to avoid SCTLD up until now.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Steve
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Coral-List mailing list
> > Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> > https://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/mailman/listinfo/coral-list
> >
> --
>
>
>
> Phillip Dustan PhD
> Charleston SC 29424
> 843-953-8086 office
> 843-224-3321 (mobile)
>
> "When we try to pick out anything by itself
> we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords
> that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe. "
> * John Muir 1869*
>
> *A Swim Through TIme on Carysfort Reef*
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCPJE7UE6sA
> *Raja Ampat Sustainability Project video*
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RR2SazW_VY&fbclid=IwAR09oZkEk8wQkK6LN3XzVGPgAWSujACyUfe2Ist__nYxRRSkDE_jAYqkJ7A
> *Bali Coral Bleaching 2016 video*
>
> *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxOfLTnPSUo
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxOfLTnPSUo>*
> TEDx Charleston on saving coral reefs
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwENBNrfKj4
> Google Scholar Citations:
> https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HCwfXZ0AAAAJ
> _______________________________________________
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> Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
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