Saving a Place for Marine Life

The underwater world of Anacapa Island’s north shore is a museum and cathedral, a place to worship the dazzling array of marine life that once filled the sea, but now only exists at enclaves like this one.

Clusters of spiny lobsters skitter into sea caves. Rocks bristle with softball-sized sea urchins and rare pink abalone. Sheepshead and kelp bass prowl unmolested by hook or net.

The reason life flourishes here is that every turban snail and starfish, each scallop and sea anemone is protected. This 37-acre reserve is one of a handful of small don’t-fish, don’t-take, don’t-even-think-about-it zones on the West Coast.

But as more and more fishing fleets employ increasingly sophisticated technologies to locate fewer and fewer fish, policymakers are contemplating a radical solution that only a few years ago was unthinkable: posting no-fishing signs along stretches of California’s 1,100-mile coastline.

The first step may be taken at this archipelago off Ventura County, where officials are considering a proposal to dramatically expand no-take zones in the national park. Up to 20% of the islands’ waters, or 25,000 acres, could be placed off limits to fishing--four times more than currently receives such protection throughout California.

Although the proposal has ignited intense debate, the concept of no-take reserves isendorsed by environmentalists, the National Park Service, many scientists, Gov. Gray Davis’ secretary for natural resources, the state Fish and Game Commission and even some fishing groups. A bill before the Legislature would require that fishing-free sanctuaries be established along the shoreline in three years.

“This is strong medicine. It’s a huge change from the traditional way of doing business,” said Gary E. Davis, marine biologist at Channel Islands National Park.

The idea has already caught on around the world. Nations that have closed sections of their coasts to fishing boats include South Africa, Belize, Chile and the Philippines.

In Australia, about 2% of the Great Barrier Reef is off limits. Ecuador’s reserve will encompass one-third of the waters surrounding the Galapagos Islands. New Zealand has established 14 reserves, and 35 more are under consideration.

That no-take refuges have gained serious consideration is tacit acknowledgment that the era of an ever-bountiful ocean is fast nearing an end. Fifty years ago, half the world’s prime fishing waters and stock were largely untapped. The arrival after World War II of the factory fishing boat, with its miles-long nylon nets and advanced marine electronics, has taken nearly as devastating a toll on fish as the Sharps rifle did on the buffalo a century ago.

From horizon to horizon, two-thirds of the Earth’s major fishing areas and stocks are now exhausted or seriously depleted, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In the United States, 80% of 191 commercial fish stocks are overexploited, the National Research Council says.

Other factors contributing to the declines include pollution, wetlands losses, poaching and invasive species.

Drastic Declines in Some Species

California’s tranquil coastal sunsets belie an alarming collapse of fish populations beneath the surface. Losses in the stocks of bocaccio, a rockfish that flourished off the coast 30 years ago, approach 90% since the early 1960s, and stocks of 60 other rockfish species are faring little better, said Milton Love, researcher at the Marine Sciences Institute at UC Santa Barbara.

Perhaps only 1,600 white abalone remain from the millions that populated waters off Baja and Southern California when scientists first identified the species in the 1940s. It appears destined to become the nation’s first marine invertebrate to gain protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.

In the past, wildlife managers relied upon size and catch limits and fishing seasons to preserve fish stocks. Those strategies are now widely viewed as failures.

“We’ve long thought oceans to be so vast and so infinite that nothing we could do would make much of a dent in them, but we’re learning very quickly this mind-set has been misdirected,” said Jane Lubchenco, a zoologist at Oregon State University and former president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. “What we are doing now is not working. We need to do things in a very different way. I view [no-take reserves] as one of the most powerful things that we can and should do immediately.”

At first blush, fish along much of the California coast appear to be well-protected from hooks and nets, trawlers and traps. From Crescent City to Chula Vista, 104 “marine protected areas” cover nearly one-fifth of the coast.

They restrict everything from dredging to boat traffic. But there is wide agreement that they have failed to protect fish stocks. Like a storehouse with the gates open, virtually all of the California coast is in fact open to fishing.

Only nine of the 104 protected areas are completely off limits to fishing. Those are the Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey Bay, Kings Range Ecological Reserve in Humboldt County, Big Creek Ecological Reserve near Big Sur, Vandenberg Ecological Reserve, Big Sycamore Canyon Ecological Reserve near Point Mugu, Catalina Marine Life Refuge, Point Lobos Marine Life Reserve near Carmel, Heisler Park Ecological Reserve in Orange County and Anacapa Island, said Deborah McArdle, a researcher at the Sea Grant program in Santa Barbara. She said those nine reserves constitute about 6,130 acres of the 3.6 million acres of state coastal waters--two-tenths of 1% of offshore California.

Steven N. Murray, a marine biologist at Cal State Fullerton, said, “It’s a confusing system that gives the impression the coast is really well protected, and that is not the case.”

Indeed, the protected areas are such a morass of overlapping and contradictory regulations that the state Department of Fish and Game has spent the last year trying to figure out how they fit together and what rules govern them. They were created over decades by various agencies for different purposes.

Proposals to close parts of the ocean to fishing have sparked intense debate from Ventura to New England, from Alaska to the Florida Keys. A few refuges have been established; some of the largest are at Key West, Fla.; Georges Bank off Cape Cod and in Puget Sound, Wash.

The strategy is a familiar one on land, where national parks, some private lands and game reserves were set aside to preserve everything from elk to birds. Said Warner Chabot, director of the Pacific region for the Center for Marine Conservation: “We have wilderness areas in mountains. This is trying to apply wilderness areas to the ocean.”

In California, the debate focuses on the Channel Islands. The national park is within the vast Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, the nation’s fourth-largest sanctuary and one of the most regulated tracts of ocean in the country. Yet surveys show alarming declines in the populations of sea urchins, abalone and other species because of harvesting in waters around the islands, said Davis, the national park scientist.

“Areas that used to produce an abundance of fish today either produce nothing or fish so small they are barely able to spawn,” said Jim Donlon, who has fished in the Santa Barbara Channel for half a century.

He heads the Camarillo-based Channel Islands Marine Resource Restoration Committee, a group of fishermen, citizens and scientists from Ventura County that petitioned the state Fish and Game Commission in November to prohibit fishing in at least 25,000 acres of the national park’s waters, the largest such proposed area on the West Coast.

Expanded no-take zones at the islands would affect commercial and sport fishermen, recreational boaters, kayakers, scuba divers and tourists.

Officials at the national park endorse the proposal. They envision a series of six reserves spread across four of the park’s five islands, preserving a lush underwater habitat of kelp forests, submarine canyons, sand flats and deep reefs.

In January, the five-member state Fish and Game Commission for the first time endorsed no-take refuges as an important tool to protect fish populations in California and identified the Channel Islands as the place to begin. If the strategy works there, fish exclusion zones could be expanded elsewhere along the coast, said Bob Treanor, executive director of the commission. The commission followed up this month by committing itself to creating reserves. It agreed to wait until the Fish and Game Department finishes a study on a full menu of ways to protect fish populations, including refuges.

Officials at Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco are also seeking permission to exclude fishing from some waters there.

Legislature May Act

Meanwhile, other efforts to reform the way fish populations are managed in California are underway.

The Assembly in May approved a bill by Majority Leader Kevin Shelley (D-San Francisco) to require the Department of Fish and Game to overhaul the state’s 104 marine protected areas and expand no-fishing zones by 2002. The bill is scheduled for a hearing Thursday before the state Senate Appropriations Committee.

The state Resources Agency last year assembled a Marine Managed Area Task Force to review protected pieces of shoreline, recommend ways to enhance fish stocks and determine what role no-take refuges ought to play. A draft report is expected to be delivered to agency chief Mary Nichols any day.

“We’re going to have to do some things to restrict fishing in certain areas,” she said. “To save and restore some species, there’s going to have to be areas that restrict fishing, but there’s no decisions yet on where and how to do this.”

But no-take zones are not without problems. Some scientists and government officials question whether a few small reserves are adequate to rebuild fish populations in a vast ocean.

No-fishing zones will do little to benefit migratory fish, such as hake, mackerel and sardines, three common West Coast species, said Richard Parrish, a Monterey-based biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

And scientists say more stringent fishing regulations in surrounding waters may have to accompany the refuges.

Marc Mangel, a conservation biologist at the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, said computer models show that half the coast would have to be closed to fishing to restore the stocks. Small, isolated reserves do not yield enough big fish to produce the eggs that currents can carry to recolonize adjacent waters, he said.

Consequently, the state Fish and Game Department and the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary want consideration given to other ways of protecting fish before throttling ahead with no-take refuges.

One thing is clear: In places where fishing does not occur, the undersea environment is dramatically different. Inside the 22-year-old Leigh reserve in New Zealand, snappers and lobsters are up to 15 times more abundant than in surrounding waters, said Bill Ballantine, a marine biologist at the University of Auckland. In a boon for tourism, about 100,000 people, many of them schoolchildren, visit that reserve annually, similar to Oahu’s Hanauma Bay, the oldest no-take refuge in U.S. waters, where throngs of snorkelers feed and photograph fish.

While creeping along California’s Central Coast in a submarine, UC Santa Barbara scientist Love recently discovered a spot that fishermen haven’t found.

“The surprise I felt was like a paleontologist walking into Griffith Park and seeing a bunch of mammoths walking around. I almost soiled my clothes,” he recalled. “There were no little fish, but there were a lot of big fish. We’ve never seen anything like that in 150 submarine trips off the California coast. This is probably what every place looked like 500 years ago.”

Proponents say fishing-free zones are the only way to ensure that fish will grow to adulthood. Big fish are essential, they say, to function as brood stock--a mature red snapper, for example, produces nearly 2 million eggs per year, 18 times more than an adolescent--and repopulate surrounding waters.

But for fishing interests, closing vast tracts of water is a political nonstarter. In the Florida Keys, for example, biologists recommended a network of reserves to protect 15% of the fish habitat, but the plan was pared to 1% in 1997 because of opposition from fishing groups, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

To get fish refuges started, proponents suggest barring fishing in about 20% of a species’ habitat, although that figure is suspect too. It is an estimate extrapolated from experience with wildlife populations on land and from studies showing that fish stocks crash when populations dip below 20% of their level before the depletion began, Lubchenco said.

“This is not a real hard scientific judgment. We are not at a point where we can say with confidence just how much is needed,” she said.

People who make a living from fishing have mixed views.

On the one hand, although they are reluctant to surrender their livelihood, many fishermen acknowledge that existing regulations have failed and that new approaches are needed. They don’t want to see the West Coast go the way of New England, where the collapse of scallop and ground fish stocks forced the closure of 6,000 square miles of ocean at Georges Bank and led to a $27-million government buyout of trawlers.

In an example of cooperation, fishermen joined scientists to persuade San Juan County, Wash., commissioners to create eight voluntary no-take refuges in 1997 to halt dramatic declines of rockfish and greenlings.

“We are looking for much better marine management. Unless we make some changes, our kids and grandkids aren’t going to have any fish out there,” said Tom Raftican, president of United Anglers of Southern California, the state’s largest sportfishing group.

On the other hand, some fishermen and the California Department of Fish and Game fear that there is a rush to ban fishing from portions of the coast before key questions are answered. Will no-take refuges be rigorously guarded to prevent them from becoming reserves for poachers? Where are the best places to put them? How will the scientists and regulators determine if they work? Can other approaches accomplish the same goals?

“This is the latest fad in fisheries. There’s a lot of rhetoric and very little science behind it,” said Zeke Grader of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Assns., the biggest coalition of commercial fishermen in California. “We’re open-minded about it, but we’re not willing to jump in with these people who want to lock up the ocean without some good science behind them.”

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More underwater photos from the north shore of Anacapa Island are available on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/refuge.

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Fishing Limits

California has relied on ocean reserves since 1907 to protect marine resources, but fish rarely receive more protection inside them than in surrounding waters. Only nine of 104 marine protected areas, encompassing less than 1% of the state’s 3.6 million acres in the Pacific, prohibit fishing. The vast majority of the coast is governed by traditional regulations, which scientists say have failed to protect many commercial and sport fisheries and need to be augmented with use of more no-take.