Gilbert Martínez has his work cut out for him. A reef ranger for the Belize Department of Fisheries, he spends his days patrolling a 87,000-acre Marine Protected Area called Glover’s Reef, an azure paradise of an atoll about 28 miles from the country’s mainland. I met him while reporting for an article in Tuesday’s Science Times about a reef-monitoring project in the atoll that is sponsored by the Bronx-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
Beneath the white hull of Mr. Martínez’s patrol boat was a system of some 800 patch reefs teeming with diverse life. Robust corals, sponges the size of oil barrels, spiny lobsters and a dizzying array of multihued tropical fish all call this place home.
The ranger’s job to protect these animals from overfishing and other damage. Within just three hours on a recent afternoon on which I accompanied him, he encountered at least three men illegally collecting conch, a local favorite that can fetch $15 a pound in local markets.
One of these men was just outside the so-called no-take zone, where no fishing of any kind is allowed. It is legal for him to collect conch here so long as they weigh three ounces or more. The fisherman’s bag was swollen with the slimy reef-dwellers, which are cut from their shells by using a short blade.
One by one, Mr. Martínez had the man weigh the conch; 24 of them proved to be undersize, and he wrote a citation that will cost the man almost $500 — not a small sum in a country where fishermen often earn less than $4,000 a year.
“That’s really a lot,” Mr. Martínez said of the undersize conch he found in the man’s bag. “if you take 10 a day, that can cause a lot of damage.”
Scientists say that overfishing has wreaked havoc throughout the Caribbean, which is why marine reserves like Glover’s are so important. Belize’s government has imposed strict limits on what can be caught, and although there are definitely gaps in enforcement, some scientists here say the efforts to preserve important species like sharks are working.
“I know a lot of people were skeptical, and even I was surprised at first, that a small marine reserve could make a difference in the longevity and the population size sharks,” said Ellen K. Pikitch, a marine biologist with Stony Brook University who is a force behind a study of sharks here. “What we’ve learned after a 10-year period is parks do work for sharks they are actually effective at keeping populations stable.”
Keeping populations stable might not sound like much, but some shark populations are in severe decline throughout the world, in part because of the broad demand for their meat and a growing demand for shark fin soup in China.
(Here is a video I prepared of shark fishermen cutting fins from sharks and dumping their bodies back into the water.)
Ms. Pikitch and other scientists and conservationists are now trying to push Belize to create more reserves like Glover’s that allow some fishing in specified zones but maintain others where no fishing is allowed so that species can grow back and be replenished.