Monday, November 12, 2007

Conflicting Views on Protecting Coral Reefs by Protecting Grazing Fishes

Recently, a publication in the journal “Nature” by Peter Mumby, et al, was widely distributed and was featured in various news agencies and fora, and endorsed by the WWF, etc.  The article (click here to view the full article) promotes a simple method of protecting coral reefs or restoring degraded reefs by ensuring that grazing fishes (such as parrotfish) are not fished.  However, some disagree with the simplicity of this theory.

The authors of this original article hold that grazing will reduce macro-algae (seaweed) growth and thus prevent the corals from being overgrown.  However, according to others, this solution seriously oversimplifies the situation, by not including the effects of nutrients on algae growth and assuming parrotfish will eat all seaweeds.

Protecting grazing fish is of course important and definitely plays a role in keeping seaweeds under control, but in situations with nutrient pollution coming from land-based sources, it is a dangerous oversimplification which distracts from the even more urgent necessity to control land-based nutrient pollution, or even provides an excuse not to address the land-based sources at all because the grazing fish will take care of it.

For that reason, we thought our readers may be interested in reading a rebuttal paper by Tom Goreau, who believes it is important to provide a more balanced picture of the coral reef processes.  You may view the rebuttal paper by clicking here (in PDF format).  (Source:  NACRI)