Overfishing Seen As More Damaging To Reefs Than Tsunami

[george]

Overfishing seen as more damaging to reefs than tsunami

PARIS: -- Minutes before the tsunami struck in December 2004, reefs off Indonesia and India were thrust three meters above the ocean surface as the earth's tectonic plates buckled in an earthquake that ripped like a broken zipper along a fault line 1,300 kilometers long.

As the tremors subsided, a shock wave of water hit coral boulders half the size of houses, rolling them along the ocean floor, gouging giant troughs in the sediment. The waves dredged up soil from freshly plowed rice paddies and dumped it on the reefs, which were also smothered by land debris, waste oil and pesticides. In the Seychelles and East Africa, reefs already weakened by the El Niño weather phenomenon were blasted by their own rubble.

But none of this will have as lasting and as devastating an impact on the Indian Ocean coral reefs as damage stemming from the hand of man, according to a study by 60 researchers in 12 countries on the state of the reefs in the wake of the worst tsunami ever recorded.

While reefs in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Andaman Islands off Sumatra and the Nicobar Islands off India were hit hard - Thailand lost an estimated 13 percent of its coral reefs - the researchers' report concluded that most reefs damaged by the tsunami will regenerate in five to 10 years, even if the most badly damaged reefs take 20 years to recover.

Instead, far greater danger stems from fishing practices that are destroying the reefs and decimating the fish that serve as the reefs' immune system, cleaning the coral and keeping down the algae that otherwise would smother them, the researchers found in the report, which was to be presented in Paris on Tuesday.

According to Clive Wilkinson, who coordinated the report for the Australian-based Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, quakes and tsunamis are natural stresses that have damaged reefs for millions of years, while contemporary fishing methods, many illegal, are having a devastating effect.

"The single biggest danger to the reefs right now is continued overfishing," said Wilkinson, a marine biologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. "Generally it's fishing, trap fishing, net fishing, and more recently dynamite fishing."

The practice of using bombs, which allows fishermen to scoop up 40 percent of the dead fish from the surface but leaves the rest to rot on the ocean floor, is prevalent in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, and is starting to catch on in East Africa, Sri Lanka and Thailand, Wilkinson said. For fishermen, explosives are "dirt cheap. All they have to buy is a fuse, a coke bottle, and a mixture of diesel and fertilizer, and they have got a bomb," he said.

Trap fishing poses a danger when nonbiodegradable traps work loose from their moorings and continue to trap fish forever on the ocean floor.

"When you take out the fish that are easy to catch, the grouper and snapper, then the only way to catch the rest of them is with traps and bombs," Wilkinson said. "That creates lots of collateral damage."

Elsewhere in the region, injecting reefs with cyanide, then collecting and reviving the dying fish by rinsing the poison out through their gills, is becoming a lucrative trade, with restaurants paying top dollar for live produce. But, Wilkinson says, the cyanide lingers in the reef beds and slowly poisons the coral.

Overfishing has been exacerbated by well-meaning governments and nongovernment organizations that were eager to help the tsunami-devastated nations to recover. They donated thousands of boats to villages and islands in the region, and some went to people who had never had boats in the past.

"Before the tsunami there were 6,500 boats on the Tamil Nadu coast, in the south part of India in the Bay of Bengal. Now there's 11,000," Wilkinson said. "It looks like they have just about doubled the capacity and effort that can go into fishing after the tsunami."

While coral reefs provide food and income for millions of people in the region, they also act as a buffer in protecting delicate coastal regions from the brunt of tropical storms.

"Reefs are very good at protecting the land from storm surges and cyclones, and that's going to happen more in the future, with more climate change," Wilkinson said. "Climate change will certainly push the value of the reefs up."

The report concluded that, in addition to establishing an early warning system in case of another tsunami, governments need to control ongoing stresses to the reefs rather than investing in unproven technology designed to repair them.

Governments also need to focus on appropriate and sustainable rehabilitation of coastal regions, and establish a concerted policy to protect the environment that involves collaboration among national, provincial and village administrations.

"The tsunami caused some localized damage, but ongoing human stresses pose a far greater threat to the survival of the Indian Ocean coral reefs and mangrove forests," the report said.

--IHT 2006-03-14

[astral]

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