Q1_Winter_2017_AlertDiver

23 / 116

| 21
marauding crown-of-thorns
starfish — and there’s a good
chance they will bounce back.
But for decades, corals have
been subjected to a host of slings
and arrows that beat them down
until they eventually succumb.
“It’s like your immune system,”
said Beth Dieveney, a policy
analyst for NOAA’s Florida Keys
National Marine Sanctuary. “The
more stress you’re under, and the
more impacts you’re hit by, the
weaker and weaker you get.”
Some of those stressors
are fixable. Dieveney said the
sanctuary has developed an
elaborate network of marine
zones within the wider sanctuary
boundaries to help protect the
Keys’ coral reefs from accidental
damage through popular
activities like boating and fishing.
The sanctuary also issued
the permits for CRF’s coral-
restoration work and has spent
decades seeking to educate the
public and reduce threats such
as land-based pollution on the
region’s corals. “The idea is that
the local things we can control
will help shore up the coral reef
for the more global impacts that
are harder to address at a local
level,” Dieveney said.
She’s referring to, of course,
climate change and ocean
acidification — two massive
global problems that, left
unchecked, will continue to
wreak havoc on coral-reef
ecosystems everywhere. And if
that happens, Moore said, no
amount of restoration will be
enough. “Restoration is not the
long-term solution here,” Moore
said. “Restoration is something
that helps us buy time. We can’t
go out and destroy reefs because
we know how to restore them.
The most important thing we
can do is conserve the ones we
already have.” AD