JEDDAH — Traditional local fishery management pays off and can play a big role in helping restore and maintain fish numbers in stressed coral reef fisheries within developing countries, according to a study. Using genetic “fin-printing,” the international team of scientists, including King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Assistant Professor of Marine Science Michael Berumen and postdoctoral fellow Pablo Saenz-Agudelo, has gathered the first clear proof that small and traditional fishing grounds that are effectively managed by local communities can help re-stock both themselves and surrounding marine areas.The finding has significant implications for hundreds of millions of people around the world who depend on coral reefs for food and livelihood. In an article published in the latest edition of Current Biology, the researchers report that the offspring of protected squaretail coral grouper breeding in community-managed areas in Papua New Guinea were plentiful both in the managed area and in surrounding fishery tenures. Working with local fishers on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, the team took fin samples from a spawning aggregation of coral groupers in a tiny marine reserve and then collected similar samples from juvenile fish up to 33 kilometers away to determine how many were offspring of the parent group, using DNA parentage analysis. They found that 17 to 25 percent of all juveniles collected in the managed area were from this particular group of parent fish, as were 6 to 17 percent of all juvenile groupers caught in four neighboring fishery areas. The researchers predicted from their findings that half of all coral grouper young settle within 14 kilometers of the spawning site following their 25-day larval period. Berumen said: “This project has very clear applications; real world benefits that are readily apparent. “It was very important to the researchers that what we did was useful and relevant to the villages involved, that they understood the project and the outcome. And they did immediately.” Some form of traditional marine management has operated for centuries and the scientists claim this study provides hard scientific evidence that it works. The results of the study are particularly important to countries around the world where government fisheries schemes are lacking or poorly enforced and to areas like the Coral Triangle (Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and East Timor) that feeds hundreds of millions of people and are under stress from development, overfishing and climate change. The results can empower people in this region and throughout Oceania to take effective local actions that help ensure their own food security, the scientists concluded. According to Dr. Glenn Almany of James Cook University in Australia, first author of the article: “This gives us a really great handle on how different fishery areas interconnect and can support one another. “It also shows that the community which bears the cost of operating a marine reserve derives the greatest benefit.” The core team for this project formed in 2004 and, at that time, consisted of researchers from James Cook University (Australia), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the US and the University of Perpignan (France). Also involved in this work are researchers from the Nature Conservancy in New Guinea and Australia, the University of Hawaii (USA), the University of Melbourne (Australia), Centre de Recherches Insulaires et Observatoire de l'Environnement (French Polynesia) and KAUST.
