Awareness through personal experience..

Although there are many academic sources of scuba diving and reef destruction to pull off of the web and from peer reviewed journals, for this blog I would like to share some personal experiences.  These experiences may offer some insight as to why I decided to write this blog in the first place.   Although I am not an extremely experienced scuba diver, I have been diving quite a few times in different parts of the world.  Each country I dove in I had different experiences, some good and some bad, I will share some with you now.

My first diving experience, after I received my certification was in Belize off the coast of Caye Caulker.  The reefs were beautiful and abundant with marine life, but the diving outfit I dove with was another story.  The company was run by a local man who grew up on the island, he said the reefs have fed him his entire life.  He didn’t see the problem with spear fishing on the reefs, he even supplied anyone who wanted to spear fish with a gun, as long as they shared the catch with him.  He encouraged us to pluck oysters off the reefs and even to catch a sea turtle if we saw one, “The make great soup!” he would say!  Although I didn’t shoot any fish or catch any turtles for him, I couldn’t help but think how much marine life this man takes off the reef.  He brings people day in and day out through the same reefs, encouraging them to pick, pluck and plunder anything they want.  This is terrible behaviour to be teaching scuba divers regardless of where it is. There didn’t seem to be any regulations in Belize to stop this kind of behaviour, it was really quite shocking.

My next dives were in Honduras and it was a completely different story.  I dove off the massive dive island of Utila that sees thousands of scuba divers a week.  Each company has strict regulations, no touching the fish, the reefs or any marine life.  It was nice to see that some reefs and companies have regulations to prevent reef degradation.  When I got under the water in Honduras I saw a bleak sight though and I realized why they may have these regulations.  Most of the reefs seemed dead and lifeless, with only the odd bit of pink or green with a lonely fish clinging to what’s left of its dying reef.  It was shocking and it is a stark contrast to the vibrant array of colours and creatures you would expect while scuba diving.   The dive master told me that most of the reefs had been killed off from coral bleaching, which I discussed in my last blog.  I couldn’t help but wonder how much of an effect hundreds of divers a day to these reefs may have had on the fish populations, especially in the days before regulations were put in place.

So those were my first two diving experiences, both with extremely startling situations that emphasize the poor health of our reefs and the bleak future they may have if we don’t do something to reverse it.  You can see now why I decided to write my blog on reef destruction! 

A picture my friend took while spear fishing in Belize.  He found out this fish isn't even edible after he speared it.  What a waste!

Tune in next week for more reef action!

Other sources of reef destruction

Since we now know how scuba divers are destroying our reefs and what the impact of that is, I am going to look at reefs through a wider lens.  For this blog I will be changing the topic ever so slightly to look at the degradation of our reefs from all means of human impact.  According to ocean world.com, 10% of our oceans reefs are completely destroyed and in places like the Philippines with no regulations on fishing and pollution as much as 70% of the reefs are gone.

Coral is under attack from a variety of different angles.  The largest is global warming.  Coral has existed as is for thousands of years, growing in the ocean temperatures that it is accustomed to.  With global warming raising the temperatures of our oceans, it is causing problems for the reefs.  The warmer waters stress the coral out, making it more susceptible to diseases.  This causes the coral to die off in mass quantities, turning it white.  This is called coral bleaching and according to oceanworld.com it is responsible for up to 25% of reef destruction world wide and as much as 50% in the Indian Ocean. 

The other major cause of reef destruction is pollution.  Since most reefs are in waters close to developing countries, there is no regulation on sewage and waste dumping.  This means most countries just dump their human and toxic waste into the oceans, killing the reefs and the fish that call them home. 

Other contributors to reef destruction are development and fishing.  Again since the reefs sit near developing countries, there are no fishing or development regulations on many reefs.  This means that it is open season for fisherman to use dynamite or nets to catch rare and endangered species off our fragile reefs.  It also means that developers can build resorts in the ideal location, right on a coral reef!  Who wouldn’t want to spend a week at a resort that is right by a coral reef?  Don’t mind the fact that the hundreds of visitors a day will surely kill the reef and scare all of the marine life away!

The degradation of our reefs is a serious issue that needs to be dealt with.  Tune in next week for more information on our dyeing reefs and what we can do to help them!

http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/students/coral/coral5.htm
http://www.destination-scuba.com/Coral-reef-destruction.html

A fisherman in the Philippines using dynamite to catch fish.  Dynamite fishing not only kills fish but the reef around it aswell.     http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/students/coral/coral5.htm

Effect of divers on reefs in Sharm-el-Shei Egypt

In this blog I will be discussing the results of a study conducted by Julie P. Hawkins and Callum M. Roberts of the British Ecological Society.  I found the study in a peer reviewed journal called The Journal of Applied Ecology, the study is called Effects of Recreational Scuba Diving on Coral Reefs: Trampling on Reef-Flat Communities.  The study looked at the effects of scuba diving on a reef off the coast of Sharm-el-Shei in Egypt.  The reef is a popular dive spot that sees hundreds of divers each week.  The study compared the health and marine life in the area of this reef with another similar reef that is more difficult to access and therefore much less dived.  The findings are quite shocking!

The study was conducted by randomly choosing 20 sections of the reef and comparing them with 20 sections from the healthy or unvisited reef nearby.  A complete evaluation of the sections was then done, recording each hard and soft coral, broken or fragmented coral and  measuring the size, species, amount and health of all the coral on the reef.  The same was done for the control or unvisited reef. 

Data was then analysed using ANOVA which is a method for analyzing reef quality.   Percentage cover and species composition data are analysed using a cluster analysis and the Bray-Curtis similarity index for cover data, which is a way to analyse clustered and ununiformed data. 

So what were the findings?

Broken and dead coral was much more prevalent on the dived reef.  The percentage cover of hard coral was significantly reduced on the dived reefs, as was the areas of bare substrate, which is where nothing is growing.  The amount of soft coral, as well as the height and diameter were also greatly reduced on the dived reef. 

Although there was a large difference between the coral size and life of the differing reefs, the study found that divers didn’t completely kill any of the living coral communities.  The constant breaks and cuts incurred on the corral from the divers will force the coral to spend energy repairing itself rather than growing.  This makes for shorter, stockier coral and less coral abundance overall but it does not kill the reef completely.  Although the study finds that divers are not threatening to completely kill the reef, they do cause a lot of damage.  The undived reef also had more fish and marine life around it, which may be a sign that divers are scaring the fish away from their natural habitats to go somewhere where they won’t harassed by divers.

Although its bad news, it is interesting to actually get some hard evidence on the effect that divers are having on our reefs!  I hope you enjoyed this blog entry!  Stay tuned next week for my next blog posting!

Below I have attatched the link for the study, and a picture of a beautiful and healthy reef in Sharm-el-Shei!

Makes me want to go diving in Egypt!

http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.tru.ca/stable/pdfplus/2404267.pdf?acceptTC=true

How are divers destroying the reefs?

In my first blog posting I said that scuba divers are contributing to the destruction of our reefs.  Statistics say that over ¼ of our coral reefs are already dead.  Destination Scuba says that an average of 600 Square miles of living coral reef is completely destroyed in the Pacific Ocean each year, with more being destroyed each year.  But how, you may ask do divers have anything to do with this?  Scuba divers affect and damage reefs in 5 different ways.

1.       Excited divers kicking their fins in an effort to propel themselves can kick and break the corals without even noticing what they are doing.  I have seen people do this many times, people get so distracted by the action going on in front of them that they don’t pay attention to what is behind them.  I have even had my regulator kicked out of my mouth by unaware divers who just kept going oblivious to what they have done.

2.       Divers grabbing coral in an attempt to stabilize themselves.  This is especially true for inexperienced divers who can’t control their buoyance.  They find themselves floating away from the bottom so they grab a hold of the first thing they see which is the coral.  Divers who are unable to control their buoyance also bump and grind down the reef, destroying it as they go.

3.       People stealing parts of the reef to take home.  While most dive outfits strictly forbid this, people still try to snag a piece of the reef as a souvenir. 

4.       Dive boat anchors.  Many dive companies like to get you as close to the reef as they can so when you’re in the water you don’t have to swim as far.  This means that they drop their massive dive boat anchor directly onto the reefs crushing everything beneath it.

5.       Pollution.  Many dive companies, especially in developing countries don’t have rules against littering in the ocean.  I’ve been on dive trips where people are allowed to throw their garbage into the water while having lunch about the reef. 

So these are the five main ways that divers destroy reefs.  You may be thinking to yourself, I’ve touched or seen coral on the beach before and it is as hard as a rock, how can a divers fin kick cause enough damage to destroy a reef?  Most coral reefs are hard on the inside but the outer layer is very delicate and can be damaged quite easily.  Coral is made from an organism called polyps.  These polyps create a hard exoskeleton to protect themselves and when they die they leave the exoskeleton behind.  This cycle repeats over years and this is how many types of hard corals grow.  For this reason the living polyps on the outside are very susceptible to damage.  Soft corals are a different story, they are one single unit and can be destroyed much easier and ripped apart just like a small plant. http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coral.html.  You could imagine the impact hundreds of people walking through a forest has on the small plants in the area, it is much the same for coral reefs.

So now that we know how coral is damaged and why, next week I will look at some studies done on different reefs around the world examining the impact of reefs dived on vs. untouched reefs.  The findings are startling.  I hope to see you next week!