When my sons were born, an average Caribbean reef was covered by 50 to 60 percent live coral; today it is 5 to 10 percent. This is the equivalent of losing pine forests from Georgia or aspens from the Rocky (Mountains) in less than 30 years. During this same period, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia lost about 50 percent of its (coral) cover. Worldwide, coral reefs are being (converted) to seaweed-covered meadows that do not support the biodiverse assemblage of species that allow a reef to function.
With reef loss, the villagers of Fiji lose food security fish from the sea, the (protection) from storm surge that the (reef) provides, income from tourists who come to Fiji for its beautiful reefs, and many other critical ecosystem services that are the lifeblood of tropical island nations and peoples.
Reef loss results from a host of synergistic and growing (environmental) insults: overfishing, global change, ocean acidification, pollution, coral disease. What can local villagers do to preserve reefs when so many of the stresses are global? Will local efforts to manage fishing and pollution be enough, or will global-scale ocean warming and (acidification) kill the reefs anyway? The long-term answer is unclear, but the short-term results are (promising). When fishing is prohibited, the intact food web on a reef helps it recover from even large-scale climate stresses, disease outbreaks, etc.
Our present work in Fiji focuses on determining how (seaweeds) affect corals some seaweeds poison corals when they come into contact; which fishes best control the most damaging (seaweeds) by eating them despite the bioactive chemicals they produce; and how villagers might (limit) or focus fishing practices to leave critical components of the food web (intact), allowing corals, fishes, seaweeds, and villagers to sustainably coexist in a way that preserves reef presence and function. Much of this work is focused on understanding chemical (signals) in the sea and how transmission of these chemicals among organisms constitutes the language of life on a reef, altering organism behaviors in ways that can (facilitate) reef health and recovery or, if interfered with, cause reef decline and initiate the biotic death spiral that modern reefs seem to be experiencing.