Puerto Rico expands coastal reserve

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico: On the 15th anniversary of a million-gallon oil spill that damaged the coastline of Puerto Rico, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and various other organizations are celebrating the purchase of 152 acres to expand a coastal reserve near one of the areas hardest areas hit by the spill on the north eastern part of the island.

NOAA, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the Trust for Public Land announced Wednesday that 152 acres east of San Juan have been added to the San Miguel Natural Reserve to help compensate the public for lost recreational beach use and injured natural resources for an extended period after the Berman Oil Spill on Jan. 7, 1994.

The 422 acre San Miguel Natural Reserve protects beachfront habitat for fish, turtles and birds on 15th anniversary of a major oil spill which occurred near San Juan in 1994

The purchase of this land expands the San Miguel Natural Reserve to 422 acres, an area the size of 317 football fields, and contributes to a multi-year effort to create the Northeast Ecological Corridor, one of the Caribbean’s last great unprotected areas.

"Expanding this coastal treasure of beach, mangroves, wetlands and forests protects the health of our coasts and provides the people of Puerto Rico with a wonderful place to swim, fish, hike and enjoy the beauty of the ocean,” said NOAA's Office of Habitat Conservation Director Patricia Montanio said in a written statement.

The San Miguel Natural Reserve is a mosaic of coastal habitats including near shore coral reefs, more than a mile of beachfront, intertidal areas, wetlands, coastal dry forests, mangroves, the confluence of two rivers, and the remnants of a 19th century hacienda used for sugar cane farming. The reserve is home to 16 federally listed threatened and endangered species, including the endangered leatherback turtle which nests here.

"Preserving this site provides a continuous stretch of protected coastal shoreline, preventing the fragmentation of critical habitat,” Trust for Public Land's Puerto Rico Project Manager Mildred Ramos Majoros said. “It also ensures that publicly accessible coastal lands and waters are not privately developed and will continue to provide recreational areas to boat, swim, and fish."

Beach at San Miguel Natural Reserve

The expansion of San Miguel Natural Reserve completes a project begun in 2007 when the Trust for Public Land purchased the first 270 acres to create the reserve. The reserve is one of a series of projects by NOAA, the National Park Service and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Funding for these projects comes in part from a $9.7 million court settlement with the parties responsible for the spill.

The 1994 spill occurred when the Morris J. Berman, a 302-foot-long, 90-foot-wide barge, carrying 1.5 million gallons of number six fuel oil, ran aground near San Juan, releasing nearly a million gallons of oil into coastal waters.

Other projects including creation of a coral reef trail and restoration of several historic forts in San Juan that were damaged in the spill are also pending.

"NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources," Ramos Majoros said.

Author: María Miranda Sierra
Source: Caribbean Net News

Researching Impact Of Global Warming On Corals

ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2008) — For just one late-summer night each year, the shallow waters off the coast of Puerto Rico fill with the pale-pink spawn of elkhorn corals -- the tiny, round packets of the adult corals' eggs and sperm.

This year, Iliana Baums, assistant professor of biology at Penn State, is there to collect the coral spawn as part of a research and education project to grow the newborn juvenile corals for distribution to aquaria and to the wild. "It looks like it's snowing," she said, "except that the egg and sperm packets rise underwater to the surface rather than fall to the ground."

Baums's reason for collecting the spawn is twofold: she hopes to acquire important information about how corals will respond to global warming, and she also is teaching a group of 28 aquarium professionals, as part of an international workshop, how they can participate in the protection of corals. Baums will hunt for and collect coral spawn on the nights of 21 and 22 August. For seven days thereafter, she will remain at the site, working to grow the newborn juvenile corals for distribution to aquaria and to the wild.

According to Baums, corals are extremely sensitive to changes in water temperature. "An increase in water temperature of just a couple degrees Celsius results in visible damage to adult corals and their offspring," she said. Referring to a paper published in a July 2008 issue of the journal Science in which the authors report that one-third of all reef-building corals face an elevated risk of extinction from climate change and other factors, Baums said it is imperative that scientists and marine-resource managers begin to think about how to rescue these important animals.

That's why Baums is searching for particular populations of coral that produce offspring that are better able to withstand high water temperatures. Because most coral species are triggered by moonlight to release their egg-sperm packets, Baums will begin her experiment with a nighttime trip to a designated reef off the coast of Puerto Rico. There, she will collect spawn from elkhorn corals, which are protected as a threatened species by the United States Endangered Species Act. In small rearing chambers, she will place eggs from certain populations with sperm from certain other populations.

Over the next seven days, she will raise the newly formed juvenile corals in saltwater tanks on land. She then will ship half of them to several aquaria around the world and will return the other half to the reef. "Corals are most vulnerable when they are very small, and our protected nursery will help them to get through the first critical days," said Baums.

Next, the juvenile corals in captivity will be subjected to a variety of higher-than-normal and lower-than-normal water temperatures in order to pinpoint those offspring whose parents can tolerate abnormal water conditions. Once Baums identifies these individuals, she will search their genomes for variants of genes that are responsible for resistance to abnormal water temperatures. With this knowledge, she then can develop genetic markers that will enable her to identify wild elkhorn-coral populations throughout the Caribbean that contain such gene variants.

Water from the ocean is pumped into tubs where juvenile corals will be raised for a period of seven days after scientists harvest them from the wild.

In collaboration with SECORE (SExual COral REproduction), an international organization of professional aquarists and scientists that is concerned about coral conservation, Baums will hold a workshop during the annual coral-spawning event in Puerto Rico. Through the workshop, she and other researchers will teach a group of 28 aquarium professionals from around the world how to collect coral spawn, do fertilization experiments, raise larvae, and care for larvae once they are shipped back to the participants' home institutions. The workshop, which is now in its third year, already has been given to over 60 aquarium professionals. Baums and other members of SECORE plan to continue to the workshop in future years to reach as many aquarium professionals as possible.

"Poachers often collect wild corals to satisfy the demand for aquariums, but aquarium professionals are looking for alternative, less destructive sources of these animals. SECORE's goal is to develop methods to eventually breed corals in captivity, thereby reducing some of the pressure to collect corals from the wild," she said. "We are starting by raising juveniles from wild-caught eggs and sperm, which enables us to provide aquariums with the corals they desire without damaging wild adult colonies.

In return, the aquarium operators help us to perform the experiments and give us tips on how to raise adult corals in captivity, which is something they are very good at." Baums added that the establishment of good aquarium populations is a safeguard against the extinction of elkhorn corals.

The corals that Baums ships to aquaria will undergo one of two treatments: half of them will be exposed to species of the zooxanthellae -- algae that live inside the cells of corals and provide them with necessary nutrients and energy -- that naturally occur with elkhorn corals, and half of them will be exposed to zooxanthellae from other regions of the world, where elkhorn corals are not present.

In past years, elkhorn corals in captivity readily took up foreign zooxanthellae and coped better than those that took up only native species of zooxanthellae. These observations will be tested in a controlled experiment as part of this year's workshop. While Baums said she would not release foreign strains of zooxanthellae into the wild, she does think such measures could be beneficial to corals that are maintained in aquaria.

Baums is partnering with Margaret Miller, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who will do the same experiment using corals from Florida, where annual minimum water temperatures are lower. The team will compare corals in the two locations to learn if there are any differences in their abilities to withstand high and low water temperatures. A goal of the research is to find out if current temperature differences between Florida and Puerto Rico will influence the abilities of corals to tolerate future warm-water conditions associated with global warming.

This research and the workshop are funded by the NOAA and the National Science Foundation.

Photo: Scientists capture coral spawn using a special net. (Credit: Ramon Villaverde, Columbus Zoo)

U.S. coral reefs under threat, report finds

By Michael Christie

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (Reuters) - Half of U.S. coral reefs are in poor or fair condition, threatened by climate change and human activities like sports fishing, shipping and the release of untreated sewage, a U.S. government report said on Monday.

Reefs in the Caribbean, in particular, are under severe assault and coral in the U.S. Virgin Islands and off Puerto Rico had not recovered from 2005, when unusually warm waters that led to massive bleaching and disease killed up to 90 percent of the marine organisms on some reefs.

"The evidence is warning us that many of our coral reef ecosystems are imperiled and we as a community must act now," said Kacky Andrews, program manager of the Coral Reef Conservation program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The new NOAA report on the state of coral reefs in the United States and Pacific territories, including Palau and Guam, was presented at a meeting of coral reef scientists in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

It was the third such report and the second to be based on actual monitoring of reefs. The reefs were classified as excellent, good, fair or poor based on such things as water quality, fish population and the threats they faced.

The last report was issued in 2005 when warm Atlantic waters killed off large swaths of coral through bleaching, a condition that occurs when environmental stresses, like heat, break down the symbiotic relationship between coral polyps and unicellular algae that give them color.

Half the coral reefs off the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico were killed that year, said Jenny Waddell, a marine biologist at NOAA's Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment. On some reefs, the fatality rate reached 90 percent, she said.

A series of powerful hurricanes also devastated coral reefs off the Florida Keys in 2005.

HUMAN EFFECTS

But scientists at NOAA said coral reefs had been suffering for much longer due to a warming climate and other "stressors," many due to human activity, such as overfishing and damage caused by ship anchors.

"It is important to note that these declines did not happen overnight, they did not happen during the last three years," said Andrews.

"The degradation has happened over the past several decades and recovery may require similar time frames. Although there are a number of measures that we can implement in order to promote conservation, there are no quick fixes."

The NOAA report was based on reef monitoring in 15 areas in the Atlantic and Pacific.

It said that reefs near populated areas tended to suffer more intense threats due to coastal development and recreational activities like boating, diving and fishing, but even remote reefs were affected by climate change.

Reefs in the vast Pacific Ocean tended to be more resilient, with a greater diversity of both coral and fish, NOAA scientists said. While Pacific reefs had been able to start recovering from worldwide bleaching in 1998, Caribbean reefs had not.

Human activity had not just left Caribbean reefs battered, but also pretty tame in terms of marine life, said Alan Friedlander, a NOAA marine biologist based in Hawaii.

"When you dive in remote parts of the Pacific you really feel like an intruder, like you don't belong there and the big guys let you know. You feel way down the food chain," he said.