BRINGING UP CORAL

Coral reefs are among the most diverse — and endangered — ecosystems in the world. From ships running aground to global climate change, the number of problems facing them is staggering. Two national park sites have begun creative efforts to save and even reconstruct reefs.
     
BY STEVE HYMON

   ONE BY ONE, the tourists rise from their beach towels and wade into the turquoise sea of Virgin Islands National Park. Many are escapees from winter. Armed with cheap underwater cameras and rental fins, the tourists—myself included—plop into the water without a shred of grace.

   Later, one by one, we emerge from the waters of Trunk Bay, on the isle of St. John, wearing ear-to-ear grins. Snorkeling amid the many colorful and curious fish on a coral reef has that effect. It's like taking a plunge into biodiversity soup. At one point, it occurs to me that I never have been and likely never will be so close to so much wildlife in a national park on land.

   Throughout the day, I make repeated visits to the water, reminding myself of something else: This fairly healthy reef at Trunk Bay is something of an anomaly. Back in my hotel room is a pile of scientific papers, all saying that coral reefs around the world are in trouble. One document, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, predicts that if present conditions continue, 70 percent of the world's coral reefs will disappear by the year 2050. Yet, as awareness of the precarious state of these fragile areas is building, so are creative efforts to save and even reconstruct them.

    Coral reefs are found in ten U.S. national parks—six in the East, including Biscayne National Park near Miami and Virgin Islands National Park, two in Hawaii, and two in the South Pacific. Few of these corals have escaped the problems that plague reefs worldwide.

   "There are not as many reef fish as there used to be; there's more algae, more coral diseases, and more reefs that…are now simply gone," says Ginger Garrison, a marine ecologist with the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

   Richard Curry, Biscayne National Park's science coordinator, tells much the same story. "When I first began working for the park in 1977, the coral cover was something like 15 percent," he says. "Now it's something like 1 percent. Is that a sick reef? I think so."

   Found in the tropics and subtropics, coral reefs are among the world's oldest and most diverse ecosystems. At their most basic level, corals are a marriage between tiny coral animals and a plant living inside them called zooxanthellae. The zooxanthellae provide the corals with oxygen and food, and the corals secrete a skeleton that is the foundation of a reef. The reefs offer habitat to hundreds of thousands of species, including more than one-quarter of all marine life and 40 percent of the world's fish species.

   But the real kicker is this: Scientists have yet to identify most of these species or even begin to untangle, much less understand, the tens of thousands of ecological relationships that sustain reefs. Nor can anyone readily explain why reefs, covering well under 1 percent of the Earth's surface, attract so many forms of life.

    This much is known: Despite the beauty of many reefs, the number of problems facing them is staggering. Ships and boats run aground or drop anchors on reefs, often causing irreparable harm. Increasing numbers of hurricanes tear reefs apart, a rise that some researchers attribute to global climate change. Corals are killed by pollution or smothered by erosion from bad land practices. Overfishing and the destruction of adjacent habitats—such as mangroves and seagrass, which serve as nurseries for many reef fish—change myriad critical ecological balances that exist in and around reef communities.

   Perhaps the most troubling problem is coral disease. Beginning in the early 1980s, at least three suspected diseases have swept through Caribbean waters, killing or drastically weakening corals. The source of these diseases is a mystery, but a small group of researchers suspects that African dust blown across the Atlantic by trade winds in summer is carrying pathogens that may cause some outbreaks.

    "People say the dust has been coming over for centuries and so what's the big deal," says Ginger Garrison. "But there has been a drought in Africa for 30 years, and the Sahara Desert is moving south. Land-use practices are changing. Maybe there are things like pesticides or plasticizers in the dust. The point is that we need to find out if it's happening and, if so, then it's up to the policymakers to do something about it." The USGS has identified more than 60 types of living microbes from dust events in the Virgin Islands, including the species of fungus known to cause disease in Caribbean sea fans. The traces of arsenic and mercury found in the dust most likely are due to the burning of garbage and charcoal, but may be linked to gold mining in the Sahara.

   In both Biscayne and Virgin Islands national parks, large ships and recreational boats have also demonstrated the uncanny ability to plow into reefs. At Biscayne, located directly south of Miami and adjacent to a major shipping lane, Curry, the park's science coordinator, says, "in some cases, the reefs have been absolutely flattened."

   In the early 1990s, alarmed by the destruction of so many reefs, Curry built a small coral nursery. The idea is simple: Perhaps coral grown in a semi-controlled setting could later be used to restore damaged reefs.

    The nursery is hardly a high-tech venture, consisting as it does of several concrete blocks stacked in a protected underwater hole. Five different types of corals, all of which had been knocked off reefs, were glued to the concrete. Over time, all the corals have grown; the problem Curry must now solve is how to reconstruct damaged reefs using natural processes and products. Using visually intrusive bolts or toxic glues, he says, is not an option.

   Curry recently received $50,000 from the Park Service, money he intends to use to establish three more nurseries, with two in locations with easy access for visitors. He also plans to begin a volunteer monitoring program and pursue research to encourage the growth of nursery corals.

   A similar study wrapped up this past May in Virgin Islands National Park. In 1988, with a single drop of its anchor, the cruise ship Windspirit destroyed nearly 300 square meters of one park reef. After seeking a way to repair the reef for years, in 1999 Ginger Garrison began a coral transplant program with $48,000 in funds garnered from several non-public sources. The first step involved harvesting coral fragments that had been broken off from reefs by storm swells and landed in places on the ocean floor where they were unlikely to survive. Then, using plastic cable ties, Garrison and her team secured the fragments to healthy reefs.
Two of the three corals she tried barely survived, but elkhorn corals often grew over the cables and fused to the reef.

   "Elkhorn is like the big trees in a rainforest," says Garrison. "It gives the reefs spatial complexity, and it's one of the species that builds the reef."

    Equally important were the 140 volunteer monitors, including a class from a local school, who snorkeled to check the progress of the transplants. The volunteers were, in the words of one, "a living, walking, breathing outreach program" for a park that had previously had no relationship with the local community.

   Garrison has since moved to another post in Florida but would like to see the park build a coral nursery—although she, like Curry, is quick to caution that nurseries are not a panacea for problems besetting many coral reefs. The reason is simple: The most troublesome impacts are coming from outside national park boundaries from unknown sources, and often there's little park officials can do about it.

   One chronic problem facing coral reefs is overfishing. As the old saying goes, big fish eat little fish. But in recent years, large and easily targeted top-level predators such as the Nassau grouper have been virtually wiped out.

   "So instead of having a lot of fish eating other fish on many of the reefs in the Caribbean, you have a lot more herbivores," says Garrison. "That's going to mean something to the reef; we just don't know exactly what."

    For example, some researchers believe having too many damsels, an herbivore, may result in loss of coral cover. Elsewhere, overfishing and disease reduced the number of sea urchins (typically caught when fishermen targeted triggerfish), eliminating a species that grazes on the algae that can smother corals.

   Although overfishing is widely recognized as a problem, national parks have traditionally had little say in how a park's waters or adjacent areas are fished, because jurisdiction over these areas typically falls to a state or another authority. Six of ten national parks with corals, in fact, allow commercial fishing.

   An attempt to control fishing was one reason President Bill Clinton on January 17, 2001, in his last days in office, used the Antiquities Act to create a 13,000-acre national monument next to Virgin Islands National Park and add 18,000 acres to Buck Island Reef National Monument. In the new Virgin Islands Coral National Monument, fishing will be off-limits in all but two locations, the hope being that this "no-take zone" will replenish the area's fisheries and protect adjacent ecosystems upon which coral reefs depend.

   The plan, predictably, created a political firestorm. With St. John's economy almost wholly dependent on tourism, some argued that prohibiting fishing in this area is an affront to traditional rights and culture. Park officials maintained that the no-take zones would actually help fishing in the long run by improving fish populations throughout the Virgin Islands. In a column that appeared in the November/December 1998 issue of National Parks, Gary E. Davis, marine ecologist and fisheries scientist, wrote that studies conducted in a variety of countries, including the United States, Kenya, Australia, and New Zealand, show that some species of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks were two to 25 times more abundant in no-take zones than in surrounding areas.

   In March, Interior Secretary Gale Norton asked local officials to propose changes to boundaries and rules for all the monuments created by President Clinton in January. As of this writing in early May, she had not issued any decisions. But at the same time Norton was considering changing the new protections, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush—President Bush's brother—was approving strict no-take rules for the 185-square-mile Tortugas Ecological Reserve. No fishing of any kind will be allowed in the reserve. In addition, neighboring Dry Tortugas National Park designated 42 percent of its surrounding waterways as a Research Natural Area, which effectively means a no-take zone.

   Another problem is that of the ten parks with corals, seven are operating under general management plans (documents that spell out how a park manages visitors and protects its resources) written in 1983 or earlier, before the demise of many of the world's reefs. According to the Park Service, not one of the ten parks provides for complete protection of corals, although Dry Tortugas, which is in the final stages of implementing a new plan, and American Samoa come closest.

   Other positive changes are taking place. In 1998, President Clinton signed an executive order creating the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force, which directed federal agencies to take a number of steps to further our knowledge of reef ecosystems. In the next year's budget, Clinton also included a request to fund these efforts, at the time an unprecedented action.

   "This was a pitifully poor park until two years ago," says John King, superintendent of Virgin Islands National Park. "Now the budget is such that we can provide minimal services. I don't know how they operated before this. We now have a 14-person resource management division; for years we operated with only one person."

   On my final day on St. John, Ginger Garrison drove me across the island to Haulover Bay. At one point as we snorkeled around the reefs in the remote bay, I was surrounded by more than 100 blue damsels. It was a lovely, giddy moment that didn't last long, because even the number of damsels points to a larger problem.

   "This used to be one of the best two reefs on the island," says Garrison. "In the last few years, many of the corals here died. The number of fish has fallen, and there are more damsels and no groupers."

   "Something here is amiss," she concludes, "and no one is sure exactly what it is or why."

STEVE HYMON writes frequently about the environment from his home in Santa Monica, California.