The Reef Report: Q3 2013 and the State of Jamaica’s Coral Ecosystems

Briefing

• Reef survey found coral cover recovering at Discovery Bay and some Portland sites.
• Montego Bay reef corridor remained severely degraded despite marine park protections.
• Overfishing of herbivorous fish identified as primary ongoing threat to recovery.
• Climate modelling suggested reef systems would face stress threshold events by 2020s.
• Eco-tourism operators reported growing interest in reef diving that was not reef-commensurate.

The comprehensive survey of Jamaica’s coral reef systems, the results of which were published and discussed widely in the summer of 2013, was remarkable for the precision with which it demonstrated that Jamaica’s reefs were not a single story. The reef at Discovery Bay, the subject of decades of scientific monitoring and the site where scientists had documented the catastrophic collapse of Diadema sea urchin populations in 1983, was showing genuine recovery in coral cover on some transects. The reefs off sections of the Portland coast, where direct human pressure was relatively lower and water quality relatively better, were also in measurably better condition than the island’s reefs as a whole. These were not trivial findings, and they were not consistent with the narrative of universal and irreversible decline that had dominated the popular discourse about Caribbean reefs.

But the findings from the reefs off Montego Bay were an illustration of the other side of that same story. The Montego Bay Marine Park, established in 1992, was one of the oldest marine protected areas in the Caribbean. It had provided partial protection from certain types of direct damage for two decades. Yet the reefs within its boundaries remained in poor condition relative to both their historical baseline and the recovering reefs elsewhere on the island. The reason was not the marine park’s existence but the limits of what a marine park can protect against: the park’s boundaries did not extend to the watershed whose runoff was loading the reef’s waters with nutrients and sediments, and they did not reach the coastal development that was generating the physical disturbance and thermal stress conditions that prevented the recovery that might otherwise have occurred.

Herbivores and Recovery

The survey’s identification of herbivorous fish abundance as the primary determinant of coral recovery potential was significant for its implications about fisheries management. The reefs showing recovery were, in most cases, reefs where parrotfish and surgeonfish populations had recovered to levels sufficient to keep algae growth in check, creating the conditions in which coral recruitment could occur. The reefs showing continued degradation were, in most cases, reefs where herbivore populations remained suppressed by continued fishing pressure, including the use of fish pots — a fishing method that scientists had argued for years was especially damaging to reef fish populations and that was subject to a government moratorium that was, in practice, inconsistently enforced.

Eco-Tourism and Carrying Capacity

The growing commercial interest in reef diving and snorkelling that eco-tourism operators were reporting in 2013 raised a question that the reef survey data made more pointed: the reefs whose recovery status was most encouraging were largely reefs that were not yet significant dive destinations. The reefs that were already heavily visited by dive operators were, in the survey’s findings, generally not the reefs showing recovery. Whether reef tourism could be managed at levels consistent with reef recovery, or whether recovery and intensive recreational use were incompatible, was not a question the survey answered. It was, however, the question that coastal managers and tourism planners would need to answer if Jamaica was serious about both the conservation of its reef systems and the development of the eco-tourism market that those systems could support.

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