The ‘Status of the U.S. Coral Reefs Report” was released to coincide with the opening in this Florida city of the weeklong 11th International Coral Reef Symposium.
“Pacific coral reef ecosystems appear to be less affected by threats and are generally in better condition than reef ecosystems in the Atlantic/ Caribbean/ Gulf of Mexico region,” said the report’s executive summary.
“Many of the Pacific jurisdictions extend over large areas of ocean, encompassing islands and reefs that are either too remote or too inhospitable to support human settlements,” the report stated.
“As a result, coral reef ecosystems are in relatively good condition in several Pacific jurisdictions, in particular the North Western Hawaiian Islands, Pacific Remote Islands Area, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau, where live coral cover can exceed 70 percent,” it added.
Not only do the American territories and the Freely Associated States in the Pacific have greater coral cover than those in the Caribbean, the Pacific islands also have greater capacity to recover from stress induced phenomenon like coral bleaching.
The reason for this is linked to the relative healthy status of coral reefs in the Pacific.
“Some corals have what we call resilience, in that when a healthy reef is hit with bleaching, it bounces back,” explains Douglas Fenner, a scientist with the Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources in American Samoa.
“This is why corals in the Pacific tend to recover, and we want to keep it that way,” he said.
The coral reefs report did raise some disturbing incidents like marine pollution brought about mainly by the high concentration of people in small atolls.
“Of the 83 water quality monitoring sites surveyed in Saipan, Tinian and Rota (CNMI) in 2006, over 37 percent were classified as impaired due to excess nutrient and bacteria levels,” said the report.
“Data from populated areas of the Marshalls indicate that coral reefs near sewage outfalls and dump sites are prone to overgrowth by a black encrusting algae that can cover 30 percent of the substrate,” the report stated.
“Corals living in shallow back reef pools in American Samoa have begun to bleach annually, but with little resulting mortality,” it added.
Sedimentation studies in Palau, American Samoa, the CNMI, and Guam document inputs and track impacts of sediment pulses on nearby reefs.
“In American Samoa, sites near river mouths averaged about 60 times more sediment than sites near points,” the report said.
“In Guam and the CNMI, corals suffered disturbances from crown-of-thorns sea stars, which eat live corals, and bleaching events, particularly in early fall of 2006 and 2007,” the report added.
The status of coral reefs in the
