ScubaBrucie

A marine ecosystem is a lot different from a land ecosystem. On land the food chain is usually very simple, carnivore eats herbivore. In the water the food chain is usually very long with a large number of small steps all the way from plankton up to shark. So if you remove a species from the food chain it has a huge impact on the whole ecosystem. The species below it are under predated on and rise in number while the species above it lose a source of food and become less plentiful. So if you for example removed the species that predate on parrot fish then they would become excessive in numbers and cause destruction of hard corals.

Fishing is not the romantic worm on a hook and hope for something to come along model that some think it is. Fishing is a form of hunting where the fisherman uses a range of techniques to target the specific species that he wants to catch based on the economic or food value of that fish.

So by allowing fishing everywhere on the marine park in Bonaire the whole ecosystem is distorted. Other marine parks throughout the world either have no take zones or are totally no take. Spain has the reputation for the most rapacious fishermen in the world but they still managed the spectacular success of the no take Medas marine park, read about it here http://www.bsactravelclub.co.uk/reports/medas1.html . In Australia 33% of the Great Barrier Reef is closed to all extractive uses including fishing, other countries such as USA and South Africa are working towards this figure.

It is not just the removal of the fish in Bonaire that is the problem, it is the way that it is done. The local fishermen do not want to lose expensive anchors in the jumble that is a reef so they use boulders and building blocks wrapped in string. These they just drop onto the reef doing indiscriminate damage. Not only that, but on one trip they will lift it and drop it repeatedly as they hunt their prey, sometimes on to delicate 500 year old corals. If you keep your eyes open on a dive you will often see these boulders and building blocks abandoned when they have become jammed, it is also probably why you see so many uprooted soft corals. Look in to the fishing boats in the harbour and you will see what they use. And this is supposed to be a marine park.

It is not so many years since the men of Bonaire were forced to leave the island to find work. Now, with tourism, this is no longer necessary and the Bonarian population have become a lot better off from the many tens of millions of dollars that tourism brings to the island. The main reason for this tourism is the diving. It is just unbelievable that the govenment allows the quality of this diving to be so damaged for the miniscule economic value that reef fishing provides.

What is really galling is that the marine park on Bonaire has 2 extensive no dive zones so that they can gauge the impact of diving. As science this rates alongside creationism as total lunacy. It is obvious that the fishing has a far greater and far worse effect on the ecosystem than diving. So for proper science they need 4 different sorts of areas. No fishing or diving, just no fishing, just no diving and finaly areas were both are allowed. They need to have several of each of these to cover the full range of habitats that are present on the island.