Dynamic marine reserves

Opinion by the Santa Barbara News-Press | 7/18/04

The limited number of no-fishing zones in the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary are small but encouraging initial attempts to give sea life a break after decades of overfishing.

The protected areas should be bigger, but commercial fishing interests beat out good science in the process that led to the government creating the marine reserves.

At least, though, the present Channel Islands no-fishing zones are models for officials in establishing more such areas off California and other coastal states.

What about also protecting the waters far off the shores of Santa Barbara and the rest of the United States?

What occurs beneath the ocean's surface immediately off our shores is out of sight and out of the minds of too many Americans.

It's a problem magnified for waters far outside this country's territorial boundaries.

The open ocean needs help, too.

Recently on these pages we published a firsthand report on what overfishing and destructive practices, such as one known as longlining, have meant to large predators in the ocean beyond coastal regions. Longlining involves setting out miles-long fishing lines with thousands of hooks.

The result: Often missing these days from the open ocean are sharks, great tunas, sea turtles and other bigger creatures at the apex of marine food webs.

In today's edition, Elliott A. Norse of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Washington state returns with another commentary that sets out a proposal to help reverse this trend.

He supports an innovative use of the marine-reserve concept.

"We need safe havens to protect essential feeding and breeding places and the ocean highways that connect them," he writes. "But since these habitats move, we need to invent something that has never existed before: dynamic marine reserves, protective cordons that move with the wildlife like the security entourage surrounding moving rock stars and politicians."

Longliners, using information from satellites, know where sea life moves in the open ocean. So certainly government officials and marine biologists can use this same technology to protect the high seas as well.

Establishing dynamic marine reserves in the open ocean, as Dr. Norse notes, will require international cooperation.

Do our officials in Congress and the White House have the desire and skills to see that the United States leads in safeguarding the ocean? Or will creative proposals such as this languish until protecting the environment becomes a real priority of the people voters send to Washington?

Longliners, using information from satellites, know where sea life moves in the open ocean. So certainly government officials and marine biologists can use this same technology to protect the high seas as well.