Saving the Oceans – National Geographic with Bob Steneck
(Excerpt that includes quotes from one of our oceanographers, Dr. Robert Steneck, from the National Geographic Magazine article “Why It’s Important to Save or Seas’ Pristine Places,” published in February 2017).
Located in the U.S. Virgin Islands just off St. Croix, Buck Island rises from the Caribbean in twin green hills fringed with coral pink sand. An overlook on the 176-acre island opens onto a sweeping vista of a blue-mosaic sea—and of the underwater wonder that moved President Kennedy to create Buck Island Reef National Monument in 1961. The reefs arc around the island like a necklace, their dark form easily visible between the turquoise shallows and the cobalt depths beyond.
Kennedy’s focus had been to create the world’s first underwater trail, where anyone might enjoy what he called “one of the finest marine gardens in the Caribbean Sea.” But his 880-acre monument also included a 259-acre “no-take” area, unprecedented at the time. Buck Island was then among the most varied fisheries in the Caribbean, with a robust population of Nassau groupers. The no-take area proved too small, however. Through the 1990s, fish stocks around the island were decimated by hundreds of traps and nets. Eventually President Bill Clinton stepped in, expanding the monument to 19,015 acres.
Along with the loss of the fishery, Buck Island’s reefs have been subjected to an array of other assaults. In the 1970s and ’80s a deadly bout of white-band disease struck the elkhorn corals, the main reefbuilders, as central to the monument’s identity as Joshua trees are to their namesake park in southern California. All but 5 percent of the elkhorns succumbed, leaving coral researchers feeling as if they were on deathwatch. “I was a coroner at that point,” says Robert Steneck, a University of Maine oceanographer who has studied Buck Island since the early 1970s.
In 1989 Hurricane Hugo lashed Buck Island with 25-foot waves and 150-mile-an-hour winds, destroying part of the southern reef and flinging the surviving portion 90 feet landward. For more than a decade after the hurricane, the displaced reef groaned and creaked like a lost soul. Finally it attached to its new bottom and quieted down. Then in 2005, just as new elkhorns had begun to grow, a spike in ocean temperatures bleached corals in parts of the eastern Caribbean—including 80 percent of Buck Island’s regrown elkhorns.
When Steneck returned to Buck Island in 2014, during an overall assessment of the reefs of the eastern Caribbean, his expectations after being away for a decade were grim. Indeed, along the northern side, enormous coral haystacks were still lifeless; diving among them was like swimming through a petrified forest. But on the southern side, Steneck got a big surprise: gorgeous young elkhorns, the healthiest he encountered among all 52 sites in his 15-island study. Living coral covered 30 percent of the southern reef, compared with an average of 18.5 percent for the greater eastern Caribbean. At Buck Island, Steneck found, large numbers of parrotfish, blue tangs, and other herbivorous fish were gobbling the algae and seaweed that can choke coral growth. And so coral cover had increased.
Parrotfish are popular eating on St. Croix; the Saturday market is full of their vivid colors. But after Clinton’s expansion of the monument, managers banned all fishing—with pot, net, line, or spear—within the new limits. It was a hugely controversial decision, but one that many local fishermen now support, as Buck Island’s reefs show clear signs of coming back.
While fish stocks haven’t rebounded to historic levels—groupers in particular are still so rare that in six years one study counted only three of them—the fish on Buck Island’s south reef today are among the most abundant and biggest in the region, according to coral reef ecologist Peter Mumby of the University of Queensland in Australia. His research, like Steneck’s, concludes that abundant fish have helped the reef recover from bleaching and disease.
“Buck Island offers hope for Caribbean reefs to be able to keep building through the end of the century—if we are very optimistic about reducing climate emissions and we combine that with strong local management of fishing and pollutants,” Mumby says. “If we can manage to do both those things, our grandchildren can very well be enjoying these reefs.”
The monument also benefits animals that range far outside its boundaries. In Buck Island’s lagoon in summertime, it’s impossible not to spot the head of a foraging green turtle popping up from the sea grass beds, or even two heads—a mating pair. The reef is also one of the few protected feeding grounds for critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles, which feast on zoanthids, the fleshy polyps that colonize healthy corals. Two other vulnerable turtle species, loggerheads and leatherbacks, nest on Buck Island’s protected beaches, along with the green turtles and hawksbills. Just as Kennedy imagined, visitors can still motor out to Buck Island, picnic on its beaches, and snorkel past boulder-size brain coral on the underwater trail. What they can’t do is fish, anchor in the lagoon, or camp on the island.
Superintendent Joel A. Tutein was a 10-year-old boy watching from a boat when Washington dignitaries came to the island in 1962 and donned swimsuits and dive masks for the underwater dedication. He has watched various marine-protection efforts for half a century too—none more wrenching than the shutdown of the island’s fishery. But in the nearly 14 years since, the community has rallied around Buck Island in ways “that pull people together instead of pulling them apart,” Tutein says. Ecotourism has become an important business: Buck Island attracts around 50,000 visitors a year.
Can marine parks like Buck Island help the larger ocean recover? Consider Pulley Ridge in the Gulf of Mexico, the deepest light-dependent coral reef in the continental U.S., and another place conservationists would dearly love to see designated a marine monument. Scientists believe that fish larvae born on Pulley Ridge are carried by currents around Florida’s southern coast to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, where they replenish the stocks of threatened fish. If Pulley Ridge were protected, the Keys would benefit too.
At Buck Island scientists are researching the elkhorns’ surprising resilience, with a view to transplanting coral colonies to climate-bleached reefs elsewhere. “These biological assets are the sources for us when we get smarter,” says Zandy Hillis-Starr, chief of resource management there. If wildlife managers can help wolves and bison resurge in Yellowstone, she says, they can help sharks and groupers rebound in the sea.
Maybe they can even help cod. Back aboard the Plan b, marine biologist Witman is checking his GoPro footage from Cashes Ledge. In the Gulf of Maine today, the cod stock is estimated to be less than one percent of what it was in colonial times, in spite of decades of catch limits. Witman watches abundant cunners and fat pollacks sway to and fro with the waves and the kelp. For every 10 minutes of footage, he sees two or three cod swimming through. It doesn’t sound impressive—but it’s more than 30 times what he’d see elsewhere in the Gulf of Maine. And it makes setting aside a place where the fish can never be caught sound like a pretty sensible idea.
Cynthia Barnett, an environmental journalist, has written three books on water, including Rain: A Natural and Cultural History. She lives in Gainesville, Florida. Follow her on Twitter @CynthiaBarnett.