Artificial reef restores village fishing grouns in Bunaken

Artificial reef restores village fishing grouns in Bunaken

Mark Erdmann Contributor Bunaken, North Sulawesi

Throughout this country and Southeast Asia, the illegal practice of blast fishing has destroyed vast areas of once productive coral reef areas.

Homemade explosives are effective in killing large schools of fish with a single blast, but unfortunately also destroy the delicate coral framework that serves as shelter for coral reef fishes.

Repeated blasting of prime fishing grounds quickly reduces reefs to rubble fields that support very few fish and often show no signs of recovery, even decades after the blasting stops. The constantly shifting coral rubble smothers any new coral colonies and largely prevents recovery.

Fortunately, the science (and art!) of reef rehabilitation is beginning to make headway in "jump-starting" the natural recovery process for those reef areas where management has brought blast- fishing under control, but legacy damage remains.

Villagers from Manado Tua Island in Bunaken National Park here recently received a generous grant from the Seacology Foundation of California (www.seacology.org) to become the world's first large-scale demonstration site for the new EcoReef reef rehabilitation technology.

EcoReefs are snowflake-shaped modules made of nontoxic, microporous ceramic and designed to mimic branching coral colonies. The modules are anchored in clusters into rubble fields, where they act to stabilize the substrate and provide immediate shelter for reef fishes.

Over time, the modules are colonized by corals and other reef animals that will eventually overgrow the ceramic modules, creating a natural reef that supports productive reef fisheries once again.

The Seacology Foundation awarded the EcoReefs grant (worth over US$20,000) to Manado Tua II village in recognition of the villagers' strong commitment to preserving their reef systems and the fisheries that depend upon them by designating a series of five "no-take" sanctuary zones around their island.

The villagers requested that Seacology fund a reef rehabilitation program for a roughly 1 hectare stretch of reef that was once the most productive fishing area on the island before blast fishers leveled the reef over 15 years ago. Over the course of three weeks of mostly heavy seas and bad weather, Manado Tua villagers worked in close coordination with USAID's Natural Resources Management Project and 11 dive operators from the North Sulawesi Watersports Association (NSWA; see website at www.bunaken.info) to transport, assemble and install 620 EcoReef modules.

Beginning on Dec. 15, 2003, the villagers set up two enormous outside workshops, where men, women and children worked side by side for three days to assemble and epoxy the modules. On Dec. 17, the dive operators braved foul weather to return (with a number of interested guests) to transport the assembled modules to the rehabilitation site and install them underwater.

During the installation, the villagers held a special service to bless the reefs, followed by a gala feast together with the dive operator staff who were volunteering time to install the EcoReefs. Approximately 60 divers donated several hundred hours of dive time to install roughly half of the modules before large waves forced the boats to return home.

Over the course of Christmas and New Year's celebrations, several dedicated dive operators continued to make opportunistic runs to Manado Tua through heavy seas to install additional modules, but the weather prevented many from participating. Finally, on Jan. 10, NSWA operators showed up again in force to complete the job and install the remaining 190 modules.

While the Manado Tua villagers have pledged patience in allowing three to five years for the rehabilitation project to increase coral cover and fish abundance in the area, many dive operators were astonished to see the rapid colonization of the EcoReef modules.

Over the three-week period before the second "installation party", the EcoReef modules were colonized by various algae and were already sheltering a large number of young herbivorous fishes, who were busily grazing algae off the modules as divers worked around them.

Villagers have been excitedly monitoring the progress of the rehabilitation site, which they consider to be a marine "community bank account" that will provide fish resources for their grandchildren -- provided they carefully protect it from further disturbances.

Photographs and video of the Manado Tua rehabilitation project will soon be available for viewing on the EcoReefs website, www.ecoreefs.com.

The writer is the North Sulawesi provincial advisor to USAID's Natural Resources Management Project.