Mr. SCHEUER. Well, Dr. Porter, I want to thank you for your remarkably interesting testimony and also for those gripping pictures that you showed us.

I am going to take advantage of the informality of the way we have structured this hearing by asking you a question out of turn. You have discussed the damage done to coral reefs and seemingly quite recently from all the phenomenon, the destructive and negative phenomenon that you and others before you have identified. There has been some discussion recently about ecological restoration and mitigation. I think you yourself mentioned efforts to plant trees in the forests.

Over the course of human history, I suppose there has been an ebb and flow. We have lost species, we have gained new species. Maybe change is the life motif. Maybe that is what nature is trying to tell us. Change is eternal. Should we say that change is eternal and that coral reefs have sort of a God given mandate to come and go, to ebb and flow; or should we say we need to preserve these coral reefs and we should engage in restoration efforts because once they have gone they go forever and they play a very valuable part in the marine ecosystems? Do you advocate that we make significant efforts at restoration and remediation of the problems that are degrading coral reefs in Florida and around the world?

Dr. PORTER. I strongly recommend that we protect and, if possible, restore these coral reefs. What is not natural about the changes that I have shown you is the absence of juvenile corals of the major reef-building species. I have similar plots in Jamaica and there we did measure recruitment of coral to those areas.

Mr. SCHEUER. When you say recruitment of coral-you mean sons and daughters in those homes?

Dr. PORTER. Yes, I do.

Mr. SCHEUER. How does that happen?

Dr. PORTER. Coral reproduction occurs in most species sexually, there is also asexual reproduction, by uniting of eggs and sperm and production of a particular larvae which settles and grows into a coral reef.

Corals which reach 1cm or larger are visible to the camera system we are using. We have not seen corals of that size recruiting to our stations.

Mr. SCHEUER. Through your station in Florida?

Dr. PORTER. We have not seen them in our stations in Florida, that is correct. This also complements the work that Dr. Jaap described on the settling plates as well. We know we can see juvenile corals using the system that we have because using an identical system in Jamaica we saw recruitment.

Mr. SCHEUER. Recruitment means multiplying?

Dr. PORTER. Multiplying, yes, a rival of new colonization of coral. Now, asexual

Mr. SCHEUER. Is recruitment, either sexual or asexually-is it economically viable? In times of strained resources and limitations on what we really can do, is it a cost-effective process to try and stimulate?

Dr. PORTER. We don't know enough about the processes of coral recruitment for me to answer that. The studies need to be initiated

to determine the things which will promote coral reef health and preserve the environments we have.

After that, nature must be allowed to take its course.

Mr. NOWAK. Jim?

Mr. SCHEUER. Go ahead, Congressman Nowak.

Mr. Nowak. On your findings, you had a relatively short period here where you have identified the decline, at least in the Florida situation.

Dr. PORTER. Yes, sir.

Mr. NOWAK. You have identified a decline. Have you identified the cause of any particular decline in any of those areas that you showed with the pictures?

Dr. PORTER. The photographs reveal

Mr. NOWAK. Global warming didn't cause that in seven years.

Dr. PORTER. Bleaching did, as well as a higher incidence of blackband disease. Black-band disease, coral diseases were completely absent from these stations when they were set up. Every station had diseases at the end.

Why? We do not know that.

Mr. NOWAK. You have no idea what could have caused that black-band or any other diseases that you showed?

Dr. PORTER. A working hypothesis is that elevated nutrients may promote growth of that blue-green algae disease but that is only a hypothesis, and requires research.

Mr. NOWAK. Wouldn't that level of nutrients have had to have come from someplace?

Dr. PORTER. Yes, sir it would.

Mr. NOWAK. It didn't come all over, it came in that particular

area.

Dr. PORTER. At this point in time, this is still a speculation and it is worthy of investigation, but it is not something that we can formulate a policy on.

Mr. NOWAK. What I am saying is, if you could identify the source of that nutrient, you are going to identify what caused your problem?

Dr. PORTER. Yes.

Mr. Nowak. If you don't identify the problem, you can go monitor 400 more stations and find the same thing happening, and you can report back to this committee. We won't be here in 2020, but you could tell us this is happening all over the place.

Dr. PORTER. There are very good research programs which could investigate and determine the answer to that question. They have not yet been funded. I would agree with Dr. Rosendahl that coral reef research funding has been sporadic and totally inadequate.

Mr. NOWAK. My point is simply that unless we take that next step, do that, and try to identify where that nutrient is coming from, whether it is off a land-based farm or whether it is washing in through a sewage treatment plant or whatever, you are never going to stop the destruction from happening. If it is happening that fast, and that is seven years, it is substantial.

Dr. PORTER. Absolutely.

Mr. NOWAK. Isn't that true in the growth, in the length of these coral life cycles?

Dr. PORTER. Absolutely. We set stations up to measure corals grow and that is not what we saw.

It is critical to get the information to answer those questions specifically, and as my colleague to my left, Dr. Ogden, will describe, a broad-scale ecosystem program does exist to address issues of where materials are coming from, where they are going to, but those studies are not yet complete.

Mr. SCHEUER. That was very interesting, Dr. Porter.
Dr. PORTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SCHEUER. John Ogden, Director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography, St. Petersburg.

Dr. OGDEN. Distinguished Members of the House, Members and staff, ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to be here to comment on the current efforts of the Congress to support research related to the long-term protection and sustainable use of coral reef ecosystems. I speak on behalf of the Florida Institute of Oceanography, a consortium of the State university system, including the University of Miami and Department of Natural Resources, as well as the American Institute of Biological Sciences and International Society for Reef Studies.

Why coral reefs? Here in the developed world we place a high value on them, as we have seen so far this morning. Certainly for natural resources and tourism but perhaps we value them more as distant, exotic systems of prolific natural world.

In developing countries, their impact is much more immediate. In a recent speech, the president of Mexico, for example, tied the economic future of his country to the genetic patrimony contained within the immense diversity of its land plants and its coral reefs. Yet, also, as we have seen, there is a worldwide perception that coral reefs are in decline and the causes are related to the accumulating stresses from steadily increasing coastal human populations. It is fitting, as we have heard, that these hearings are taking place here, the site of the nicest, newest, and largest marine sanctuary and one among three with significant coral resources. The effort to develop the management plan, which incidentally is_attempting to bring together this information that Congressman Fascell asked about earlier, will guide the protection of coral reefs in the United States and serve as an example to the world.

I have three brief points to make. First, coral reefs are only one element of a complex mosaic of ecosystems, including forested land margins, coastal mangroves, and seagrass beds that interact in an interdependent tropical seascape. Research is needed that focuses on this seascape as a whole. We cannot manage coral reefs in isolation anywhere in the world.

Coral reefs exist in dynamic equilibrium, and with mangroves and seagrasses, are influenced by contact with land. Sediments and nutrients carried by freshwater runoff are filtered off by forests, mangrove wetlands and finally seagrass beds. The existence of coral reefs is directly dependent on the buffering capacity of these shoreward coastal ecosystems.

Coral reefs, in turn, buffer the influence of the open ocean on the land. In addition to these physical interactions, the systems have numerous biological linkages. Mangroves and seagrasses, for example, are nurseries for coral-dwelling organisms such as lobsters.

My second general point, coral reef ecosystem research and monitoring programs should be international, long-term, and regional in geographic scale in order to discriminate between natural cycles of change upon which human impacts are superimposed.

Your very perceptive questions are already beginning to bring this out. Research should be based at existing institutions, the marine laboratories, and apply the best available technology, which we are not doing yet, in automated environmental monitoring and remote sensing to detect long-term trends.

Subregions of the global ocean, such as the Caribbean Sea seen in the bottom part of my overhead, are interconnected by ocean currents, and have a relatively uniform marine biota living on reefs and associated systems under a variety of environmental conditions.

Research should be aimed at regional comparative studies of a wide variety of coral reef sites within these subregions where their structure differs and magnitude of human impact varies.

In this way, it should be possible to identify general principles of the function of coral reefs, their interaction with other systems, and make predictions about other coastal areas and institute scientifically-based management plans.

The Caribbean Coastal Marine Productivity or CARICOM program was established at a growing network of research sites in the Caribbean, shown on that map as dots, in 13 countries. In spite of cultural differences between the nations of the Caribbean, the research institutions have a common culture based on scientific traditions, which greatly facilitates the development of a complex international program and technology transfer which is critical to its success.

Discussions have taken place all over the world in recent years on the creation of similar marine laboratory-based networks in Micronesia, Southeast Asia, as well as even global networks for the purpose of climate change research. The coordination of regional coral reef monitoring programs will be featured in discussions at the 7th International Coral Reef Symposium in Guam this June and a lot of this information we hope to bring together.

My final point is not biological but economic.

In many parts of the world, the conservation of coral reefs does not require further research but rather economic schemes that serve the needs of nations while linking them in concerted efforts to promote sustainable use of coral reef ecosystems.

Guidelines should be established for the multilateral development bank loans for projects with potential impact on coral reefs. This strategy has aided research on tropical forests and in conservation of tropical forests.

International development projects currently fail to take into account the trade-offs and long-term impacts on the marine environment-which is as devastating to coral reefs as road development is in the Amazon Basin.

Some of the voting country members of the multilateral development banks are presently reviewing their loan policies with respect to the preservation of general biological diversity. For example, the U.S. Treasury Department with a voting share of 20 percent in the