Fish or famine

Benjamin Cowie-Haskell describes a Sherwood Forest that Robin of Loxley could never have imagined.

"It's a really incredible place," says Mr. Haskell, an official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Oceans Service. "In some areas, it's just coral as far as the eye can see." With some corals boasting mushroom-like caps thought to be up to 400 years old, "it's like an old-growth forest out there."

Sherwood Forest springs from the floor of the Tortugas Ecological Reserve - 151 square nautical miles of crystalline water brush-stroked with the brilliant hues of tropical fish and lush coral, just off the continental shelf. Formed July 1 near the Dry Tortugas National Park some 80 miles west of Key West, Fla., the reserve's two sections combine to form the nation's largest

permanent marine reserve, officials say.

The reserve, which Haskell helped establish, has become a poster child for a broader, controversial effort to dot the US coastlines with marine protected areas (MPAs). Their purposes range from protecting sensitive marine habitats such as the Tortugas Ecological Reserve to preserving cultural sites, such as the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary off Cape Hatteras, N.C., the final resting place of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor.

Overall, proponents say, the push for MPAs represents a broadening recognition among ecologists and biologists that efforts to protect single species - long the approach of many fisheries managers - are likely to fail unless the ecosystem that supports them is protected as well.

"How much can we take out of the ocean and still maintain a healthy fishery and ecosystem? That's the real experiment," says Jim Bohnsack, a marine biologist with NOAA's Southeast Fisheries Science Center in Miami. "The most important part of science is having a control.... Marine reserves are our control."

The MPA effort stems from an order of President Clinton, directing NOAA to catalog existing marine reserves and determine whether to expand existing sites or designate new ones.

For all the trappings of 21st-century marine science, the notion of conserving fish habitats stretches back at least 800 years, notes Michael Fogarty, a researcher at the NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

As early as 1366, the House of Commons in Britain banned dredging in certain areas to protect aquatic plants, oysters, mussels, and fish. "[This is] what we would recognize today as an ecosystems approach," he said during a symposium on MPAs at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last week.

But when British scientist Thomas Huxley pronounced coastal fisheries inexhaustible in 1884, "that set the stage for the general perception that the seas are inexhaustible," Dr. Fogarty says.

Ironically, scientists conducted experiments a year later in Scotland's Firth of Forth to test Huxley's notion. They found that overharvesting could occur and had serious effects on local ecosystems. But they had a hard time outshouting Huxley.

These days, evidence that the sea does not represent an inexhaustible food bank is mounting. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, 60 percent of known fishing stocks need "urgent" management to prevent them from collapsing.

In July, a team of marine scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., reported the results of a study to track the evolution of aquatic habitats in coastal areas around the world.

Noting that "historical abundances of consumer species were fantastically large in comparison with recent observations," the team concluded that overfishing has played a greater role in the collapse of coastal ecosystems than any other human influence. Their work appeared in the July 27 issue of the journal Science.

For the US alone, 46 percent of the nation's fisheries are deemed unhealthy, says Roger Griffis, with NOAA's newly established MPA Center. In the face of such numbers, as well as other environmental changes and demands stemming from population growth, "the question is: How are we going to zone our ocean resources?" he says.

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