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Building the Nation's Largest Marine Ecological Reserve: The Story of the Tortugas Ecological Reserve
From: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
| By:
Benjamin D. Cowie-Haskell |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Creating the nation's largest marine ecological reserve took 10 years of work from a variety of people to ensure that the needs and goals of various stakeholders were met. The Tortugas Ecological Reserve contains vast swaths of unique coral species, some over 400 years old, and is a popular recreational fishing and diving area. Benjamin Cowie-Haskell, of the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, talks about his work in helping to create the Tortugas Ecological Reserve and gives examples of some of the specific issues and problems they had to deal with. This is an edited version of the talk he gave at the Fisheries, Oceanography and Society Symposium entitled "Marine Protected Areas: Design and Implementation for Conservation and Fisheries Restoration," at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in August 2001. |
 'd like to talk about the nitty-gritty of establishing a marine reserve, in this case the Tortugas Ecological Reserve. The story has a happy ending in that in July 2001, after three years of intensive work and sign off by several different agencies, the Tortugas Ecological Reserve was created. It encompasses 151 square nautical miles of rich, deep coral bank communities. In the case of Tortugas South, it includes some very deep water--down to about 2,000 feet of deep-water habitat. |
 Other good news is that the Department of Interior has decided to make an area within the Dry Tortugas National Park a no-take marine reserve, which they call a research natural area, so that is contiguous with Tortugas North. These three areas combined make an incredible marine reserve spanning about 196 square nautical miles of incredibly rich coral habitat. |
The Tortugas Reserve was created through the National Marine Sanctuaries Act in conjunction with the Magnuson Act and it was created to protect marine biological diversity. It wasn't done as a fisheries management reserve, although there may be some benefits--and we hope there are--down the line. |
Where exactly is the reserve? It is in a very strategic location. It's approximately 70 miles west of Key West and over 100 miles from mainland Florida, obviously remote, and it's at the confluence of some major currents. The Loop Current comes out of the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida Current comes out of the Caribbean Sea, which are channeled through a narrow pass between the Florida Keys and Cuba. |
Our study area was Dry Tortugas National Park, which is not part of the sanctuary but a marine protected area. Fort Jefferson was actually one of the world's first marine protected areas. It started in 1935 as a national monument and then it became a national park. The area referred to as DRTO in the figure is the Dry Tortugas National Park and the area referred to as the FKNMS is the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and this includes Tortugas North and South. |
This reserve didn't just appear out of whole cloth. It was the result of 10 years of hard work by sanctuary superintendent Billy Causey and his staff and stakeholders who were concerned about the environment there. Folks who used the Sanctuary resources worked hand in hand with the Sanctuary staff to create not only the sanctuary but this network of 23 zones that were established in 1997 by the final management plan for the overall sanctuary. These zones represent .05 percent of the entire area, and that's down from proposals of about 20 percent that were reduced to about 12 percent that were further reduced to about 6 percent--and this is what we ended up with. |
In an area like the Florida Keys that's quite an accomplishment, if you know the Florida Keys. People there are very independent-minded and government is pretty much a bad word down there. So getting this was pretty incredible, but it's a far cry from the earlier proposals that were out there. And that included an ecological reserve, which then was called a replenishment reserve, in the Dry Tortugas. It also included one off of Key Largo--quite a large swath--from shore to the coral reef tract. It included one through the Middle Keys, one through the Marquesas, and then the Western Sambo Ecological Reserve. The Western Sambo Ecological Reserve is the only one that made it through the various filters of public policy and the Sanctuary Advisory Council. |
However, in the final management plan, we stated that based on the public comments that we received, the Dry Tortugas Replenishment Reserve was in the wrong place, it wasn't protecting the vast coral reef and it was seriously impacting fishermen, primarily commercial fisherman. So in the final management plan we explicitly stated that we're going to come back to the table with our colleagues from the National Park Service and work with the stakeholders and redesign this area and do it right. |
That was notice to everybody that the train is leaving the station and you can either get on it or you can stand in front of it, but we were going forward. This place is quite an incredible habitat, with the highest bottom cover of coral in the Keys of 30 percent and greater. In some places it's just coral as far as the eye can see--and much of the coral has this unique mushroom-shaped morphology. Bob Ginsburg at the University of Miami thinks this is two species of Montastrea. He also estimates that these mushroom heads are over 400 years old, so it's like an old-growth forest out there. It's got the most successful sea turtle nesting area in all of the Florida Keys. The visibility is 100-feet plus routinely. We find black corals when you don't find them in the rest of the Keys--although you used to--as well as crinoids, which are very sensitive to water quality although found only out here now. So it's just a really incredible place. |
Jerry Ault and Jim Bohnsack have been going out there for many years now, getting baseline data. There are vast meadows of soft corals here that appear to be a nursery ground for tropical fish. Besides the fact that it's a special place in need of protection, there are also some threats. Among them are anchor damage from large freighters that would go to the Tortugas, drop their six to eight-ton anchors on the coral reef because they held well, and await their orders where to go in the Gulf of Mexico for their next pick-up or shipment. So they would sit there for days, sometimes months, and their anchor chains would drag over the bottom, scarifying the bottom, and when they left and pulled up their anchor it turned into a huge bulldozer. Prior to the reserve, the sanctuary stopped anchoring by vessels over 50 meters in this area. That unfortunately pushed them into other areas within the sanctuary and outside of it that also have coral reefs. The problem is still there, but we are protecting this special area. |
The other problem is significant serial overfishing throughout the Florida Keys. The Tortugas is a little better off, but still there's a major problem out there. |
The process took about three years for the reserve. As I stated, it took 10 years to develop the other zone network to lay the foundation for this reserve. This one started in April 1998 with the convening of the ad hoc working group, which is part of the Sanctuary Advisory Council, and we brought in some outside members as well to represent some of the stakeholders who weren't represented on the advisory council. So we started with the reserve design process and then Phase 2 was to get the draft impact statement and management plan out and get comments on that and Phase 3 was to refine that based on those comments and then implement the reserve, which happened in July 2001. |
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