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Resilient Reefs in Palau

The following is a comment from Dr. Goreau regarding an article in the 4/17/2007 New York Times titled, No-Fishing Zones in Tropics Yield Fast Payoffs for Reefs, that discusses reefs in Palau that are recovering by themselves.

(See: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/science/earth/17fish.html for the NYT article.)

The whole "resilience" claim is essentially bogus wishful thinking and self delusion, and is an outgrowth of people telling the funders (i.e. the US and Australian governments and their camp followers like ICRI, ICRAN, and the World Bank) what they want to hear, which is that coral reefs can bounce back from any disturbance so we need not reduce stresses, and by simply waiting and doing nothing they will bloom forth all by themselves despite increasing global warming, pollution, and disease.

If you look at all these spots that people are calling "resilient" reefs, claiming that they are more resistant to stress they are either 1) areas of high chronic stress like muddy inshore areas with poor circulation in which only stress tolerant strains have been able to survive, but which have low genetic diversity, or 2) areas that far less temperature stress due to specific local differences in water circulation, mainly areas of localized upwelling and cool water. Both types of situations 1) and 2) are features that we identified very early on in the first bleaching episodes, but naturally those touting "resilience" claim to have discovered.

In most cases of type 2 these are not more resilient at all; they were simply less stressed to begin with. These are the kinds of places that they are trying to include in Palau, but they have plenty of type 1 sites in the lagoon, especially now that the road building and land clearance are giving the lagoon a mud bath. When I filmed in Palau in 1997 the reefs were overwhelmingly Acropora, after the bleaching they were overwhelmingly Porites because they were the main survivors. Curiously, there is no interest in reef restoration at all on the part of the coral reef research and mariculture institutions in Palau, only on the part of the fishermen who are suffering the consequences of habitat deterioration.

 Thomas J. Goreau, PhD