How to Save Declining Coral Reefs: Tropical Fish

There may be a new method to save coral reefs: fish. Scientists have found that fish are the key ingredients to restoring degraded coral reef ecosystems.

In order to better understand what may cause some coral reefs to recover more quickly than others, the researchers assessed fish biomass and functional groups from more than 800 coral reefs worldwide and used them to estimate recovery periods for both lightly fished and overfished reefs. The researchers speculate that maintaining and restoring fish populations and the functions they provide can increase the resilience of reefs to large-scale threats such as climate change.

Coral reefs all over the world are in danger. They're being impacted by overfishing, pollution and coastal development as well as by climate change. In fact, about 75 percent of the world's coral reefs are now threatened and more than 20 percent have disappeared since climate and fishing disturbances have accelerated in the past 30 years. Only about 27 percent of coral reefs are contained within marine protected areas.

"By studying remote and marine protected areas, we were able to estimate how much fish there would be on coral reefs without fishing, as well as how long it should take newly protected areas to recover," said M. Aaron MacNeil, lead author of the new study, in a news release. "This is important because we can now gauge the impact reef fisheries have had historically and make informed management decisions that include time frames for recovery."

The findings found that coral reefs with fish recovered more quickly. In addition, about 64 percent of coral reefs with fish regulations maintained more than 50 percent of their potential fish biomass.

"Reef fish play a range of important roles in the functioning of coral reef ecosystems, for example by grazing algae and controlling coral-eating invertebrates, that help to maintain the ecosystem as a whole," said Nick Graham, co-author of the new study. "By linking fisheries to ecology, we can now make informed statements about ecosystem function at a given level of fish biomass."

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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