Are Marine Protected Areas Just Paper Parks? The Shark Protection Problem

0:04 Marine protected areas work well when they are truly protected and protection works when it is real. This is the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, your weekly ocean news update. If you care about staying informed on what's happening with the ocean every weekday, hit that follow button right now so you don't miss tomorrow's story. All right, let's talk about marine protected areas in this episode. Fully protected, well-enforced marine protected areas are often called no-take MPAs. Consistently, they show that rapid increases of fish biomass happen when it's fully protected, recovery of large predators happen when it's fully protected, higher biodiversity happens when it's fully protected, greater ecosystem stability happens when they're fully protected, and spillover benefits to nearby fisheries happen when it's truly protected.

1:01 The difference between success and failure is enforcement and of course level of protection. So the key question that we have to ask today, what separates real protection from paper parks? So let's just kind of set this all up. An MPA, a Marine Protected Area, is a imaginary boundary in the ocean that protects us for a specific reason, oftentimes fisheries or biodiversity. It just depends on what you're protecting. You can protect both in that, but one is really targeted just like you would niche down a business. You know, they say that the riches are in the niches in the US.

1:42 It's niche, by the way. You can't stand hearing niches. But regardless, it works on the rhyme. But when you specify what that purpose is for a marine protected area, you will find that you'll get better protection. So you can protect for fisheries or biodiversity. Those are often the case. Now in the last episode, we discussed how some MPAs are failing top predators like sharks due to weak enforcement and loopholes. Many of these protected areas allow industrial fishing. We saw that in the UK where they allowed bottom trawling. Now if you think about this, an MPA protects an area.

2:25 It protects largely a habitat or multiple habitats that allow for a biodiverse or a diverse area to be protected. That diverse area also supports diversity of fish, diversity of invertebrates, all these different types of things that allow for food web to have its complexity and have multiple functional resources or functional uh species that will contribute to the ecosystem as a whole and contribute to that stability. When you allow for industrial fishing to come through and bottom trawl, you get rid of that habitat. It's gone. It'll take a while for it to recover. But if you go through the entire protected area or multiple times and you trawl and you dig up the bottom like a trawler would.

3:10 So a trawler is essentially it's a ship that has this net that has doors on its side that opens up the net, right? And then the net comes back and then you have this chain along the bottom that connects to the doors and then that gets grinded against the bottom as the ship moves a little slower than it normally would. And then all the fish that are on the bottom, whatever's on the bottom, will go into the net. Now you have mesh sizes that will allow larger fish to go out. Sometimes you'll have like sea turtle devices that allow sea turtles to go through the net or get out of the net so they don't get caught. But a lot of times anything that's in that area could be bycatch like marine mammals or sharks or anything like that.

3:53 And as well as other fish and invertebrates and habitats. That all goes into the net and gets destroyed. They're gone. They get taken up. Some bycatch gets thrown over. If it's in time, it works. If not, it doesn't work. It's a very destructive fishing practice. But it works really well in capturing everything. And so if you're targeting for a specific species, will catch a lot of other things, but it won't catch just what you want. But you can work it so it catches close to that. And it's used quite often. So in the UK, they use bottom trawlers in these marine protected areas. really making it not a marine protected area, it's just an area that they would protect every once in a while except when bottom trawlers would come through.

4:33 So of course if you have industrial fishing happening, if you have a lack of monitoring, so you're not really monitoring what's happening and if you're seeing the success of these marine protected areas, which there are successes in these protected areas that are actually enforced and have specific levels of uh non-activity let's just say, you will get a protected area. And of course if you don't have any compliance, if you don't have the buy-in from the people, from the fishers, for the people who are using those marine protectors or will benefit from those marine protectors but are using it nonetheless, then you will not have a marine protector. It's basically just a paper park, essentially. So that protected boundary on a map does not necessarily equal ecological protection. You'll see that there's a boundary, but without any kind of enforcement, without any kind of levels of non-extractive activity that happens, uh or the banning of extractive activity that happens, you just have a paper park.

5:28 So if you look at all of these areas where you allow industrial fishing, you don't monitor and you don't have any compliance and you contrast that with an area that does have monitoring, it doesn't allow extractive fishing or industrial fishing and it does have compliance, you get what we call protection. So like I said, when protection is real, ecosystems respond quickly. So let's look at the literature. So There are uh over 18,000 marine protected areas that exist globally. Coverage has expanded rapidly over the years, especially in the past decade. are in the 2020s, but essentially we are in the decade of the ocean where there is a rule by 2030, we will have 30 % of land and marine resources protected or marine area protected.

6:17 That's called 30 by 30. That's what you'll probably hear that a lot. There's a lot of problems with 30 by 30. The idea is understandable. It's like let's protect 30 % of the ocean by 2030 and 30 % of the land by 2030, 30 by 30. Is that, are we on our way to that? No, not at all. And have things been protected more as a paper park than a real protection? Yes, absolutely. That has definitely happened. But we're working on it and hopefully we can get some, we can change that around. There's hope that we can change that around if the right people are in place. But when you would look at those 18,000 MPAs, only a fraction are actually fully protected as in no take areas, meaning you can't take anything from there.

7:01 There are even some no take areas that you can't even do research. Scientists can't even do research to monitor. They just say, no, we're not taking it. It's a sensitive area. Often these MPAs can be a specific habitat like a coral reef, a seagrass bed or seagrass meadow or a mangrove or salt marsh or a mud flat or an important tidal area. There's a lot of different areas that it can be. It could be just an area where we know there's a specific assemblage of fish. And so we want to protect that assemblage of fish. And then other assemblages could be invertebrates as well. So it's a lot of different reasons why they can be a marine protector or what they're actually protecting. uh So once they're fully protected, then they are predicted, but that only represents a small percentage of the ocean.

7:51 So then the total coverage of ocean suggests. So 18,000 MPAs, only a fraction of that, like a small fraction, are actually no-take areas. So when you have these no-take areas, you don't allow anything by, so scientists are not allowed to do research. Some of they allow, but that's not extractive. No snorkeling, no scuba diving, no fishing. Like there's a lot of things that you cannot do in these areas. So coverage, just like the other day when we talked about like coral coverage, is not the best thing for MPA. So coverage is not the same as protection quality. Just because you have coverage, just because you have a percentage covered, doesn't mean that the quality of that area is going to be protected.

8:36 Just like coral cover percentage didn't really mean what we thought it meant in terms of the complexity in the rugosity, like the actual resiliency of a reef, if it's not 3D, if it's just a flat reef, it's not as healthy in terms of quality as you would see in a 3D reef. So just the fact that we look at an indicator as coral coverage doesn't necessarily mean that you have a healthy coral. Now some of the data that's come out, we've seen articles in Science and Nature where we've seen biomass increase. So no take MPAs show significantly higher total fish biomass compared to partially protected areas or open areas.

9:20 So the biomass of large predators such as sharks increases disproportionately. So that means it increases a huge amount. Recovery can occur within five to 10 years. Sometimes faster depending on the species that you're looking at. If it's a slow growing species like grouper, it might take a lot longer. If it's a fast growing species, it might be a lot shorter. So the recovery can happen whenever, right, depending on the species. And top predators are often the first indicators of real recovery. You start to see those predators increase in size. Like biomass is size. So how much do they weigh? That's a good indicator of healthy systems or systems starting to get healthier as you start to see like bigger sharks.

10:01 that are around, they're healthier, they're meatier, because they actually have food to feed on. Now, of course, when we look at diversity, species richness, which is the measure of the amount and number of species in fully protected areas. So if the number of species increases, that becomes a huge biodiversity gain. Functional diversity improves, meaning more ecological roles that are filled. Functional diversity is really interesting to me. Because when we talk about diversity, diversity to me means stability within an ecosystem, like a habitat. Say, let's go back to the coral reef. When you have a coral reef with a number of different corals, so you have flat corals, have boulder corals, you'll have branching corals, you have all these different types of corals.

10:50 And then you have some soft corals as well. The hard corals are like the branching, flat, and so forth. When you have a number of those, then you have resiliency within the habitat. When you have... a number of different species of fish or invertebrates that do similar things. So, clean off algae off a coral or will attack predators that are coral eating. You know, keep away predators that are coral eating. The diversity of those, if you have a lot of species that do the same thing, so say algae eaters, so herbivores, if you have a lot of herbivores on there, like a lot of different species that are herbivores, that's really great. It makes it lot more stable because If one fish species, that is the herbivore, disappears from the area, we call it extirpated from the area of this reef, then there are still other species that do the same thing.

11:40 So the corals don't become vulnerable to algal growth, right? That's a benefit. That's stability because you know that just because one species is extirpated, the other species are around to do the same kind of functional role as in eating algae. So the corals won't get overgrown. the coral system will stay most likely intact. There might be a little bit of a dip, but overall it'll be intact. And another species that the herbivore might come in or reintroduce that species and they'll become even more stable. So having that functional diversity, the greater number of species that do the same function is gonna be really stable. It's gonna act as a stability metric for the reef or for the habitat.

12:24 And then of course food webs become more complex and stable. There's gonna be a lot more layers especially of different functional roles and then those layers become a lot of food was comes a lot more complex if you think about just like a genealogy tree like if you go to 23 me or whatever I know what I've heard is a ripoff maybe not I don't know but you go to those you get like a genealogy tree a genealogy tree and you look at how complex it could be when you have so many different people coming in and you have so many layers and so many branches and so forth it's exactly the same when you think of a biodiversity tree It's not just more fish, it's more of a complete ecosystem when we talk about biodiversity gains. And of course, going back to continuing on with the ecosystem stability, protected reefs and coastal systems show greater resilience to climate stress.

13:12 If you have a healthier reef or you have a healthier seagrass metal or salt marsh or any kind of coastal zone, you have a healthier coastline. Climate change won't rear its ugly head. It might be able to affect a couple of species. But if you have that diversity of that functional role and you have that complexity within the ecosystem, that system is going to be very resilient to change, even climate change. And so that's going to be really helpful. have that structural complexity will be maintained, whether it be within a food web or whether it be that physical structural complexity we talked about on Tuesday, like two episodes ago, when we looked at how resilient a system can be when you have a complex and 3D reef, right?

13:57 And then recovery after any kind of disturbance, even if it makes damage, will be faster in marine protected areas because they're clean from anything. There's no lack of fish. There's no degraded habitat from a trawl going through or fishing hooks or anything like that. You have a healthy reef. So MPAs do not stop climate change, but intact ecosystems are better able to withstand it. Now what separates real MPAs from paper parks? We kinda talked about it a little bit. Well, let's talk a little bit, let's go into more detail. So real protection includes no extractive activities, especially industrial fishing, clear boundaries, adequate funding.

14:39 You need to fund the people to help monitor this MPA. Active enforcement, again, you need the funding for the enforcement. The enforcement allows for make sure that people are not doing anything illegal and not doing anything that goes against the success of an MPA. And the monitoring and compliance systems, making sure that everything is being watched, everything is being observed to make sure that things are going right. And then local community involvement. You need the buy-in of the local community because they are the ones who need to use that coastline for either, you know, security systems or for food or for pleasure, whatever that might be, they can use it. Paper parks are often have like, they allow commercial fishing, they have minimal patrols, so no enforcement, political designation without implementation.

15:27 So they say, hey, you know what, this is an MPA, but we're not really gonna implement it. We're not gonna put anything in it. And then no penalties for violations. So the enforcement's like, even if you do enforce, you don't get penalties. Well, that's not really gonna do anything because now people know they can do anything they want and not have to worry about So protection level and enforcement intensity are the key variables to a healthy marine protected area, even a system. Let's talk about some of the benefits of MPAs. When you have an increased fish biomass inside the no-take MPAs, that leads to that spillover effect into the adjacent fishing ground. So if you have this boundary, this imaginary boundary in this area, and you have all these species that are protected for fishing within the boundary.

16:16 Those species eventually are gonna get too big and too numerous to all be in one area. They're gonna have to go outside the boundaries. Once they go outside the boundaries, they're fair game to be fished. Now obviously fishing has to be controlled to a certain amount, but that spillover effect, like spilling over the boundaries becomes a lot better when you have high biomass and high numbers. right, and diversity of fish. So now the fishermen are, the fishing communities are going to be happy because they are able to fish responsibly, of course. And you're happy because you see the Spillow Effect happen all the time. There's going be more production within that MPA. It's just going to be a source of biological diversity and biomass, which will be wonderful.

17:00 One thing we haven't touched upon is larval export. And so that, so when you have these larvae, which is like fish species, invertebrates, whatever that might be, even corals, right, which is an When they're born or they reproduce, whether it's asexual or sexual, they produce larvae a lot of the times. That larvae is brought by currents to other areas. So again, we talk about spillover effects. This time it's larval spillover effect. That larvae will follow the current because it can't really go against the current until it settles somewhere else. And that somewhere else could be part of a network of marine protected areas like the Great Barrier Reef, or it could be just on its own and that all that spillover effect going, it might be just 10 feet, it might be 10 meters, it might be 100 feet or 100 meters away, depending on how far that current will go before the larval, the larvae will actually metamorphosize into a fish or anything or an invertebrate and look what its adult form will look like.

18:00 And it'll settle down on the bottom, whether it's a coral or anything like that. That could help build up all the uh habitats around it as long as it's safe. So a lot of the times when you have marine protected areas, You'll have a bunch of little ones in a network and that biological connectivity, which is what I was supposed to do for my PhD at one point, when it like 25 years ago, that biological connectivity will connect with the other uh other MPAs and that will become a like a sink where animals just sink in and they settle and they build more habitats and healthier habitats. So that's a pretty good thing. It creates long term fishing, fishing yields. that can help improve near and well, that can improve near and well-designed reserves.

18:44 That'll be really helpful. So it's not just conservation versus fisheries. This is short-term extraction versus long-term stability. It's really what it comes down to. When you're talking about short-term extraction, you're talking about fishing coming out for that payday, that quick payday. We're at long-term stability as you're creating an area. that will have that spillover effect, that will have that connectivity with larvae, which will be really great. Now, of course, I mentioned that the country's racing towards 30 % protection by 2030, the 30 by 30. The risk is counting areas instead of quality, right? So if we have, if a government decides, hey, you know what, I don't wanna be embarrassed by every other country who's meeting the 2020, 30, or the 30 by 30, reach that, that, index or that number, that 30%, that goal, what they're going to do is they're just going to, you know, we'll just designate a bunch of parks and they'll be paper parks, but we'll just designate them so that we actually fit there.

19:45 I don't want to, you know, I don't want my country embarrassed by other countries saying prime ministers and ministers and so forth, or presidents and stuff like that. So the risk is you're just counting area instead of high quality areas, right? And then high coverage with low protection may look, you know, politically great. but it'll ecologically fail and we don't want that. So 30 % of nothing is still 30%. So if you don't protect it, if you just put it as a paper park and you just designate the area, you're not gonna get anything of it. So quality first, then we go quantity, right? That's the biggest thing. So I wanna talk about an example, just to kind of refer an example, Cabo Palmo National Park.

20:29 This area, fishing ended in the mid 1990s. biomass increased more than 400 % for over a decade. That's a huge increase over a decade. The reef predators returned and essentially, local enforcement and community buy-in was critical and they got that buy-in and they were able to get all of these great things to happen. like biomass increased by 400%, the number increased and the biodiversity increased, all of a sudden you have this great source of fish biomass in number and diversity, and then you have the fishery that comes back again. And it's a national park that gets funded and it's enforced, right?

21:11 And then you have the community buy-in, which is critical. So like stories like this are what we talk about on this podcast. And if you want real ocean protection stories backed by science, follow this show right now so you don't miss out on tomorrow's episode. I wanna thank you so much because you know what? talking about MPAs, MPAs work. Not all MPAs are equal, but they work when they work well, when they're implemented properly, they're enforced properly, and they have the right level of protections. And enforcement is really the dividing line. And fully protected areas consistently outperform partially protected areas. So even if your government's like, yeah, we're gonna protect this area, but we're gonna allow resource extraction like fisheries or oil and gas, that's not a marine protected area.

21:59 That's a fake one. That's like fake news, right? So it's really important that we know that protection works when it is real. And it's important for you as a citizen of wherever you live to understand that when governments come out and say, hey, we're going to protect this area, you have to start looking at how they're going to protect it. What are they going to institute and follow along to make sure that they're putting out the right reports and to make sure that they actually see gains and actually seen levels of protection that are really good and making sure that extractive activities that are supposed to happen in those do not happen in those. So I want to thank you so much for listening to this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. If you want more real ocean stories like these, backed by science, backed by conservation and successful stories indeed, follow the show right now.

22:47 Hit that follow button so you don't miss tomorrow's episode, which will be an interview with Anthony Morente who's a campaigner. a senior campaigner from Oceana talking about a new ruling that was upheld in appeals court in Canada about the single use plastics ban as well as how Canada uses the statement that all plastics are toxic. We're going to talk about what that court order meant or how that court order was upheld and we are going to talk about the regulations and the future of single use plastics in Canada and around the world and what you can do. to help it. tune in to tomorrow's episode. I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Have a great day.

23:28 We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.