US coral task force gathers in Virgin Islands

KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) Scientists and government officials began a two-day meeting in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Thursday to discuss ways of protecting and, hopefully, restoring severely degraded coral reefs in U.S. waters in the Caribbean and Pacific.

The session on St. Croix involves the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force, which was set up in the late 1990s to help protect reefs. Among the topics is balancing tourism and development with ocean resource management, a big issue in the tourism-dependent Caribbean.

Around the globe, reefs have been severely degraded by overfishing, pollution, coastal development and warming seas, threats expected to intensify from climate change and ocean acidification due to greenhouse gases.

"The rapid decline of coral reefs in the Caribbean and Pacific is a wake-up call telling us that we must focus much greater attention on the diminishing health of our oceans," said Mark Schaeffer, co-chairman of the task force and U.S. assistant secretary of commerce for conservation and management.

It's an especially worrying problem for the Caribbean region, which has a multibillion-dollar beach tourism and fishing economy.

The Caribbean Sea has almost 8,000 square miles (20,720 square kilometers) of coral reefs that protect coastlines by absorbing energy from waves, and Schaeffer noted the economies of tropical coastal communities are "directly dependent upon robust coral reef ecosystems."

But live coral coverage on Caribbean reefs is down to an average of just 8 percent, from 50 percent in the 1970s, the International Union for Conservation of Nature says.

Coral is a tiny polyp-like animal that builds a calcium-carbonate shell around itself and survives in a symbiotic relationship with algae. Each provides sustenance to the other, creating a reef.

In 2005 and 2010, the Caribbean was hit hard by major "bleaching" episodes, when unusually warm water caused the animals that make up coral to expel the colorful algae they live with, creating a bleached color. If the problem persists, the coral itself dies.

"Fortunately, bleaching in the Caribbean has been patchy for the last few years," Mark Eakin, a coral reef specialist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said from the meeting.

The task force includes leaders of 12 U.S. agencies and several governors.

Eileen Sobeck, deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks in the U.S. Interior Department, said the task force is working on a variety of land and watershed projects to diminish pollution, overfishing and other pressures.

"It is only by looking at a holistic system that we can save these coral," Sobeck said in an email.

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David McFadden on Twitter: http://twitter.com/dmcfadd