Testimony Presentation

of

Dr. Phillip Dustan

Science Advisor, The Cousteau Society

on

Coral Reef Conservation Issues
 
 
 

before the

Subcommittee on Oceans and Fisheries
Chair: Olympia J. Snowe
of the
Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Chair: John McCain

30 June 1999 Hearing

 

Opening Statement of Hon. Olympia J. Snowe, U.S. Senator from Maine.

Senator Snowe:

The hearing will come to order. Before I begin, I would like to welcome the witnesses and others in attendance today for this hearing. I thank you all for coming. At today's hearing we will be exploring coral reef conservation issues and matters relating to the reauthorization of the National Marine Sanctuaries Act. There is wide agreement that coral reefs are in decline. Today we will be addressing the status of coral reefs and what can be done to reverse this decline. We will also be hearing about the need to conserve our marine resources through the use of national marine sanctuaries. The successes and shortcomings of this program, as well as ways to improve it, will also be addressed by several of our witnesses. First let me say a few words about coral reefs. They are perhaps the world's most biologically diverse and productive ecosystem. Reefs serve as essential habitat for many living marine creatures, enhancing commercial fisheries and stimulating tourism. They provide protection to coastal areas from storm surges and erosion and offer many untold potential benefits.

Dr. Dustan:

Thank you. Madam Chairman, Chairperson, good afternoon. My name is Phillip Dustan. I am testifying on behalf of the Cousteau Society. I am a professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. I am a principal investigator on the EPA coral reef monitoring project in the Florida Keys and also principal investigator on the Sustainable Seas Project. I would like to share with you some of the results of my work over the last 25 years in the Florida Keys, and I have brought a carousel of slides to do that. So if we can lower the lights, I would be happy to turn on the machine.

 

 

As we have heard today,

we know that coral reefs

 are the largest

 construction projects on

 the face of the planet. If

 you were approaching

from space, the first sign

of life you would have

on this planet would

actually be coral reefs, as

you see here in the

Maldives.

 

 

Corals in many respects are very, very thin amounts

of tissue on top of a rock that they build. So when we are

talking about coral, we are talking about maybe a tenth

of a millimeter of living flesh on top of this skeleton.

Most of the time you see them as you see

here, as mostly these animals that are expanded with their mouths.  They are 

active predators, and their yellow-

brown color is due to the algae or 

symbiotic zooxanthellae that live

in their tissues.  That is the real 

key to their ecological success.


 

 

I would like to talk to you about my work in the Florida Keys, down 

here at the bottom of Florida. 

In this photograph taken from the 

Space Shuttle, the hydroscape 

of the Florida area starts at Lake Okeechobee and the water moves 

south through the Everglades, 

through this area, and ultimately 

down through the Florida Keys, 

as well as water moving 

along the coasts.

 

 

 

This area has undergone explosive

growth in the last few years, and people

enjoy certain aspects of living in these

areas. Thousands of people go diving

every year.

Thousands of people build

houses, and I would like to 

dwell on this just for a moment

because this is an old mangrove

area that was dredged out, and

the dredge spoil was put here to

build houses on. So the original

soil was disturbed, which opens

the area up for erosion. Then

every single one of these 

houses has what you might 

call a cesspit.  It basically 

has a pipe that goes down 

into the porous rock. There 

is no sewage infrastructure 

in most of the Florida Keys. 

In a matter of hours, if you 

flush the toilet in one of 

these you will see signs of 

that out here in the canal.

 

 

People enjoy boating.

Small vessels or ships

sometimes go boating

on the reefs.

This is what it

looks like under

water, where 

we see the

wreckage of 

the boat and a

lot of broken

coral. This

particular boat,

grounded in

1974, is a 36

foot trimaran.

 

 
It absolutely destroyed an area 10 meters wide and 60 meters long of one of the most pristine reefs in the Florida Keys at that time, Key Largo Dry Rocks. By the way, that reef still looks that way today, except that it is just overgrown with algae.

 

My work began in the Florida

Keys at Carysfort Reef, the

largest and the most diverse

reef in the Florida Keys, in

1974 when I was asked to

head up a project funded 

by the Smithsonian and 

the Harbor Branch

Foundation.

 

 
We started the Florida Keys Coral Reef Project. We surveyed the reef with line transects and collected actual numerical data on the abundance of corals.

 

We encountered diseases,

such as black band

disease, which you 

had a photograph of.

This particular coral 

is probably 300 to 

500 years old and 

black band disease 

is creeping across 

its surface in terms 

of millimeters 

per day.

 

 

 

I had the dubious distinction of 

discovering the second scourge

of corals or coral disease, white

plague, so named because it 

leaves behind just the white 

bright skeleton of the coral. 

It is caused by some sort 

of a microorganism, and 

we are beginning to identify 

that now with one of my 

colleagues, Dr. Lauri 

Richardson.

 

White plague is much more virulent than black band disease. It will kill a large 

coral colony like this in a 

matter of sometimes 

days, but probably 

mostly months. 

Recently we have 

seen a resurgence of 

white band disease, and 

the divers would come 

in and ask: What are 

all those snowballs on 

the reef? And they were 

just recently dead corals.

 

So we have corals that are 

200 to 300 years old, the 

elders of the society, dying 

in a matter of months.

 

 

 

 

We also have bleaching. Bleaching

has been relatively well known for

about a hundred years. Corals 

would bleach when they were

stressed. The water is too cold,

the water is too hot, the water is

too saline, the water is not saline enough. Put the corals in the 

dark, they bleach. It has only 

been recently that they have 

become more stressed and 

the environment has become 

more stressful, that sometimes 

they bleach and die.

The bottom line to my research in the Florida Keys from 1975 to 1985 can be summarized in three slides, actually two with the third follow-on.

 
This is the shallow reef with elkhorn coral in 1975 on Carysfort Reef in our study site. It approached about 50 to 60 percent cover of the bottom at that point. It is a very healthy reef.

 
Ten years later, in 1985, this is the exact same reef. Most of this is rubble now. If you look carefully, there is a "v" here that comes out and is probably the scar marks from a relatively small boat, somewhere between 30 and 50 feet, that crashed into the reef. So the shallows have been destroyed, and the corals are not regenerating the way they used to do. Hurricanes would come through in the fifties and destroy a reef like this and the reef would regrow in a matter of years. That is not happening any more.

 

This is the reef in 1995, the same reef. There is virtually no living coral in this area. What you see here, these little black marks, are fish. That is a fish school that has come through to graze. So we have seen a precipitous decline.

 

 

Now, in 1995 the EPA started 

the Florida Keys Coral Reef Monitoring Project and I was 

asked to be a principal 

investigator on that. We 

took one site here and two 

other sites down here where 

we had been working for a 

while, and we extended the 

amount of our sampling all 

the way up and down the 

reefs, because we wanted 

to not just look at one site, 

but we wanted to increase 

the spatial scale of 

our sampling.

We studied, we

 examined and

censused for 

diseases and

 bleaching and 

various kinds 

of diseases.

We have a new

 category called

"other diseases.''

There are probably

between 5 and 15

new diseases, and

new ones being

discovered annually.

Our initial findings

actually spawned a

second project

called the Coral 

Reef Disease

Study, which is

also funded by

the EPA in the 

Florida Keys.

 

 

 

I will share with you a few repetitive sampling transects. 

In 1997 we see a relatively 

healthy coral with some areas 

of dead, but the brown here is

living coral tissue with its

symbiotic algae. In October 

there was a bleaching event 

and you can see the white area here is bleached coral. Now, at 

the same time this coral became

infected with black band disease,

and that is this band. In May of

1998 the coral had recovered its

algae, but there were large areas

that were dead and a large part 

of this is due to this disease. So

corals that are stressed, as we

heard earlier, are more susceptible

to disease most probably.

 

 

 

 

This graph summarizes what has 

happened at Carysfort Reef between 

1975 and 1997. In the shallows, with

the pictures I showed you we started 

at somewhere around 40 percent cover, 

went up a little bit, and then precipitously declined, so we are now at around 10 

percent cover or less. In the deeper 

parts of the reef we have gone from 

60 percent to 50 percent and down 

now we are at around 5 or 6 percent 

on this same reef.

 

 

Here is another series of transects 

I would like to share with you -- 

1996, '97, '98. This is Carysfort 

Reef and this is about 10 meters 

of bottom. This is a live coral here 

in 1996, and there is another one 

here and there is another one here. 

This is a dead coral. This coral in 

the middle transect, 1997, is still 

alive, but in 1998 it is dead and 

being encrusted with algae. This 

coral at the arrow has a white area 

that is white plague. It died and in 

1998 it is seen as reef rock.. These 

are the kinds of results that we are 

finding with our EPA project, which 

is probably the most precise and 

large-scale monitoring project on 

the planet for coral reefs at 

this time.

 

 

These are the first pictures that

 anyone has ever constructed to 

show actually that you can use

satellites to map and monitor the

change in reefs. In this image I 

would like to show you an aerial

photograph of the reef. This is a

lighthouse right here and that is 

the shadow of the lighthouse. 

This is about a 300 foot long 

shadow. This area of this reef,

Carysfort, are these sequences 

that I have shown you. We have 

taken the outline of this reef and 

used it to outline thematic 

mapper satellite imagery, and 

we have processed this imagery 

so the color is actually related to 

the true color of the reef, the 

browns and the yellows, and 

then out here you can see the 

blues of the sands.

The vertical axis on this three dimensional rendering is changed over time. It is very clear to see that in the last 16 years that we have this data from we see the most change on the reef occurring where we have seen the greatest ecological change. This I think represents the forefront of using satellite technology to map and monitor coral reefs, and this was done in my laboratory at the College of Charleston.

 
Now, Reefs at Risk, which you have heard about was published approximately a year ago. It suggests that about 58 percent of the coral reefs are threatened on the planet. The ones that are not threatened are the ones more in the central Pacific areas. There are dramatic threats over here in the Caribbean and also in southeast Asia.

 
We also have at the same time these coastal hypoxic dead zones which we have been hearing about. These are outlined on this map in red. What I have done here is placed the patterns of the ocean currents in this image. What we see here is, for instance, deforestation in the Amazon will be picked up by the Guyana current and brought into the Caribbean and out past the Florida Keys. We have actually detected sediments from the Guyana Shield from South America on Carysfort Reef.
So everything is connected in the oceans. What I would like to submit is that reefs are indicators of the health of the ocean. Not only are they important to themselves, but they are harbingers of a changing ocean, and harbingers in terms of what we put in localized places, what we put in from dustfall from here has created a series of nested stresses.

 

 

I think I have painted a pretty grim 

picture of what is going on, and I 

really would rather not have done 

that, but this is the truth. This is 

what I have seen with my own 

eyes. I really like the bill that 

you have proposed, S. 725, 

because it puts the money in 

the hands of little people. 

Most of the work you have 

seen here, with the exception 

of EPA, and even that is 

grossly underfunded, but 

most of this was done with 

5 and $10,000 grants or by 

myself and my students 

because we just wanted 

to do it.

Much of the innovative science today is done on that level, by people that are innovative and really just constructive and creative scientists doing this sort of work.

That goes for the conservation industry as well, all the NGO's and everybody else.

 

So in summary, I would like to say that Captain Cousteau actually taught us that the oceans are alive and he shared his love of the sea with us. He always felt that people would protect things they love, and we all love coral reefs and we all love the ocean and we all love people. So I think it is time we get together and try to make it happen.

Thank you very much, and the Cousteau Society is more than willing to work with you.

 

Senator Snowe:

I appreciate that, Dr. Dustan. It has been very helpful as well. Can you just tell me, you were showing the reef that was destroyed by a boat years ago and it is still in the same condition. Can that be rebuilt?

Dr. Dustan:

You could rebuild it if the appropriate quality of the environment were there. There have been some wonderful reconstructions, mostly by Harold Hudson down in the Florida Keys. In some places he has taken these corals and cemented them back in place, and they die now. It used to be -- in the first year after that wreck the corals regrew dramatically. But then about 5 years later they started to die, in the eighties. That particular coral, which I think is so amazing, was the signature coral of the Florida Keys. That is the coral you think of. Last year we had a very serious discussion on the coral listserver about whether or not it should be put on the Endangered Species List.

Later in the hearing, Dr. Dustan responded to a question by Senator Snowe on the application of new technology to coral reef conservation.

Dr. Dustan:

I think that we do need to develop ways to restore reefs. But again, I think the majority of scientists, of my colleagues, would say that it is futile until we can figure out how to restore the water quality, because reefs have evolved in pristine waters. This is the great paradox of the reefs. As Dr. Hunter has said, the zooxanthellae have ‘figured’ out how to trap and retain nutrients. They are the ultimate recycling system on the planet So you put them down in tropical waters that are devoid of nutrients, devoid of sediments. All they have is a lot, a tremendous amount, of solar energy and a little bit of plankton to eat, and they can couple all of that.

Once we start to increase the nutrient loading and the sediment loading in the environment, we push the bounds of that system, so other creatures now are selected to live in that environment. No matter what you do to help the corals grow, unless you can back out the water quality – and there are ways to do that – I think it is futile to restore the reef.

Senator Snowe:

Dr. Hunter, do you have any comments on that?

Dr. Hunter:

I concur with Dr. Dustan.

Later in the hearing...

Senator Snowe:

One final question for all of you in terms of our legislation on the coral reef and on the sanctuaries program. Can you give me any suggestions -- I will go down the line starting with you, Dr. Dustan -- on any one thing that we should do in legislation that is either in the bills or is not in the bill? But what would you suggest is the major priority?

Dr. Dustan:

I think the major priority for the Florida Keys specifically is build a sewage system.

Later in the hearing...

Senator Snowe:

Ship groundings, what percentage account for destruction of coral reefs through ship groundings or abandonment, whatever?

Dr. Hunter:

I think it goes back to what -- well, it is different in the Pacific and the Atlantic again.

Dr. Dustan:

It is very different. Many of the reefs in the Florida Keys are actually named after wrecks of ships: Molasses Reef, Carysfort Reef. A lot of them are named after wrecks. What we are having now is continued small boats that are smashing these reefs, as well as even research vessels. The Columbus-Islin, the University of Miami, crashed onto Looe Key. Reef and took out a couple of spurs. The Wellwood's radar went out one night and it crashed into an area on Molasses

Reef and it looked like a McDonald's parking lot. It just graded the reef thousands of square feet. Many of those are navigational errors and there are some issues now, there are some little radar beacons that will warn global positioning systems. It would be possible – most people now use GPS systems or navigational systems. It would be possible to put little warning devices and use high technology for that. A lot of it is educating people. In some respects it boils down to putting a series of buoys around the reef and a chain. Senator Snowe: Why can we not mark these? It seems so simple. I do not know why they cannot be marked in some way. Are the maps -- do the navigational maps show that? Dr. Dustan: You are absolutely right. But when you are out there anchored and somebody pulls up in an outboard that they have rented from the local dive concession and they look at you and they go, hey, man, where is the reef, and they do not have a clue. You will often see now in the Keys, there is a series of buoys around all these reefs, and if somebody starts to venture inside those buoys the people will actually start yelling and screaming at these boat operators. But for example, on Key Largo Dryrocks there is a great big I-beam that marks the reef and it says ``Danger, Exposed Rocks,'' or something like that. I have seen people drive their boats right up to the piling to read it.

Mr. Collins:

It is true.

Dr. Dustan:

Now, I do not know how. Maybe you need a boating license exam or something like that. Maybe you need some better education.

Senator Snowe:

I gather Mr. Collins agrees with you.

Dr. Dustan:

Oh, yes.

Mr. Collins:

In the original scoping hearings, the comments from the Florida Keys fishing guides were limited to two or three, mainly about water quality, but one of them was to make a boating license and an education program leading up to a mandatory one. We still believe that.

Senator Snowe:

Are they marked in the Keys at all?

Mr. Collins:

Yes.

Senator Snowe:

They are?

Mr. Collins:

They are marked. And just as the good doctor said, people will drive right up to them to see what the marker says. People ignore the markers. If you look at an aerial view of the standard markers used by the Coast Guard, they are covered on both sides because people forget whether it is red on the right or red on the left, so they go as close to the marker as they can. So there are massive track marks around all of them.

 

Back To Top