Gregory Stone, a marine biologist at the New England Aquarium in Boston, is one of the prime movers behind the Kiribati reserve. It's going to tell us what we need to know to use the most effective methods to rehabilitate the reefs where overfishing collapses the delicate balance of nature." "An area as large and as pristine as the Phoenix Islands still has all the pieces of the puzzle that we need to understand how a reef ecosystem works. "It's much better to conserve than to rehabilitate," says Alan Friedlander, a fisheries ecologist with the biogeography branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Honolulu. In a recent study of more than 600 miles of coastline in the Great Barrier Reef where fishing was banned only two years earlier, populations of a popular grouper, locally known as the coral trout, were up to 68 percent higher than in areas where fishing had continued.
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Marine reserves have proved to be even more effective than researchers hoped. The reserve is home to rare and endangered fish as well as turtles, whales, seals and birds. Commercial fishing is expected to be phased out in the area by 2011. It's about 140,000 square miles, larger than all the other U.S. In the United States, the largest protected area is the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, established in 2006 around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Vincent and the Grenadines, all of whose waters are severely overfished, have responded with a "Caribbean Challenge," which will set aside a fifth of their waters for coral and fish recovery. Other Pacific island governments agreed to do the same, in what they dubbed the "Micronesia Challenge." The Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Jamaica and St.
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Palau, a prime scuba-diving destination in the western Pacific, has created a series of no-take areas to protect its healthiest reefs, which amount to a third of its coastline. Australia has outlawed fishing along a third of the Great Barrier Reef to stem the decline of fish stocks there. The first worldwide assessment of coral reefs, released this summer, showed that a third face extinction due to climate change, disease, pollution and overfishing. Though coral reefs cover less than half a percent of the oceans' area, they host more than 25 percent of its fish species. No wonder the I-Kiribati (pronounced ee-kiri-bahs, which is what the people call themselves the country is pronounced kiri-bahs) want to showcase the reserve as a uniquely un- spoiled center for marine science, recreational diving and eco-tourism. The reserve is one of the planet's ecological bright spots, the boldest, most dramatic effort to save the oceans' coral reefs, the richest habitat in the seas. And it's the first reserve to place such a large area of open ocean off-limits to commercial fishing.
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The 158,000-square-mile Phoenix Islands Protected Area, covering about 12 percent of Kiribati's watery domain, holds some of the world's most pristine coral reefs as well as a great abundance and diversity of tropical marine life. It surrounds the Phoenix Islands, a remote, largely unpopulated archipelago 1,000 miles east of Tarawa. And yet this past January impoverished Kiribati established the world's largest protected area, a marine reserve the size of California. Infant mortality is high, life expectancy low.
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marines were killed.) The rustic charm of the traditional thatched houses, which have raised platform floors and no walls, is offset by the smell of human waste wafting from the beaches. (It was the site of one of the costliest landings in World War II, in which 1,000 U.S. Trash is abundant all along Tarawa, the capital island, a skinny atoll shaped like a backward L and crammed with 40,000 people. At first sight, the people of Kiribati, a nation of tiny islands in the central Pacific, would not appear to be model conservationists.