Mr. SCHEUER. Thank you very much, Dr. Axelrad.
Now we will hear from Dr. Archie Carr.

Dr. CARR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. Thanks very much for this opportunity to come down from Gainesville and speak to this fascinating piece of legislation.

I want to my great challenge is to confine my remarks to five minutes. My preference would be to begin celebrating for the next 24 hours, but I will try to make a few remarks that essentially follow my written testimony.

First of all, my organization, Wildlife Conservation International, wants to register in support for the Act. If it is helpful to you, we would like to bring our enthusiastic endorsement for the question of research.

Wildlife research is what we do and we have decades of experience with it as a contribution to the overall needs of conservation in the world. We do field biology chiefly on land, some in the water, and we do it globally and we have-we are always very pleased with the results. If you have a modest amount of money, research, applied research directed at conservation research is a very cost-effective way to spend that small amount of money.

Sometimes the results are extremely pleasing. We put ridiculously small amounts of money into a young graduate student who got her Ph.D. and I now see her here with the congressional committee, that is the spin-off we have seen all over the world. That is to say, your research bill should have effects far greater than the amount of money appropriated for it. I think that is something that is very significant. Obviously, other funds will be necessary for decisions later.

On the question of research, this point that I made, Charles Darwin looked at coral reefs in 1848 and published on that. And what is interesting about his record is that he studied coral reefs as a way to look at planetary events, especially continental drift.

The sea level would rise, and these major forces that are affecting our planet come into play. So this legislation has not only the opportunity to help us grasp the problems of the corals themselves, which we understand to be in a dilemma, but I think one can make the argument that indeed this bill will help us have a better view of our whole planet.

This possibly is responsive to the point you were trying to make earlier, Mr. Chairman, that this legislation gives you windows on the atmospheric events, global warming, for example, that we fear on a planetary scale. Perhaps that would impress Congress. Coral is a very useful indicator of these other events.

So a dual mission for the bill is there, I see.

For my region of the world, I work chiefly in Central America, oversee activity in Central America. I could bring the thought forward that monitoring would be extremely useful to us on the Caribbean coast of Central America. We don't have any. It would be-I can affirm it would be extremely useful to have consistent collection of very simple types of data, but in each of the main coral reef systems from Panama up to the Northern Yucatan Peninsula.

If people could collect the same data using the same protocol, and if this research program could be maintained over a decent period of time, I think it would be an inexpensive way to make a

large contribution to our understanding of what in the world is happening to our coral systems in that part of shallow waters.

Things are happening on a global scale and in a local scale. Banana companies have developed there and they are causing deforestation and contamination with exotic chemicals and we don't know what the effects are. We are suspicious and, as the gentlemen have said, we will try to take action now, but some of these effects can be very subtle.

The other point about Central America is that a chain of stations is almost essential because you are dealing with seven or eight, depending how you count, countries over a small piece of terrain and it is vital for those countries to appreciate that their environmental futures depend on the behavior of their neighbors and, therefore, shared monitoring programs and shared protocol-and shared means to compare notes-would be vital to the conservation movement of those governments and people in those countries as well as to whatever decisions we might make here in the United States.

Let me close by advising you that Wildlife Conservation International has maintained research on coral reefs in Belize Barrier Reef which we consider to be the largest barrier reef in the hemisphere and an awesome affair and one of the finest countries in our brotherhood of countries. Our work has been done with research chiefly on fish of the coral reef and management planning. We are making progress on both grounds.

Pursuant to that, a year ago the New York Zoological Society bought an island called Middle Cay on the edge of Glover's Reef, that is a correlate to what has been described as the finest developed coral reef the system. It is pristine. We are developing a management plan for it. The government is on the verge of declaring it a protected area.

On that island we hope to provide facilities for rangers to manage the park and a very small field research laboratory. The other part of that story is that we are now developing a research protocol, what does conservation science mean in the marine environment and what can we do to contribute to that?

I think perhaps my point is that, as we are developing our modest little program at the same time that this legislation is maturing in the Congress, if there is any way our experiences in Central America will, in Belize or elsewhere up and down the isthmus, can be of assistance to NOAA, EPA or other agencies we are at your service to help with that process of final details of just exactly what to do.

I have a big photograph. Unfortunately it is not a color slide, of this Middle Cay on the edge of the reef, I might pass over to you to make your mouths water.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Carr follows:]

TESTIMONY CONCERNING THE

CORAL REEF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH ACT

H.R. 4537

Presented to the

SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT

of the

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY

and the

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OCEANOGRAPHY, GREAT LAKES AND THE OUTER CONTINENTAL SHELF

of the

COMMITTEE ON MERCHANT MARINE AND FISHERIES

by

Dr. Archie Carr, III

Regional Coordinator
Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Wildlife Conservation International

April 23, 1992
Key Largo, Florida

Let me first express my appreciation for the honor of the invitation to testify before these two subcommittees. I hope my remarks are useful to your deliberations.

I would like to begin by stating my support for H.R. 4537, the "Coral Reef Environmental Research Act." The guts of the bill strike a sympathetic note with my organization, Wildlife Conservation International. As a division of the New York Zoological Society, WCI is involved in wildlife conservation in more than 40 countries around the world, and our work is almost always characterized as wildlife research. We try to provide verifiable answers to conservation questions (See Appendix A). Thus, we can affirm with enthusiasm that if Congress can appropriate only a modest sum for a global concern, like coral reef conservation, then it is good strategic thinking to direct that appropriation to research to the types of applied research contemplated by the bill.

-

If we, the public, can have the confidence that the research bill suggests that Congress may do even more in the future for the well-being of coral reefs in the world, then that would be even better.

Implementing the Coral Reef Environmental Research Act will require some draconian decision making regarding priorities for research. That is, given a modest

sum of money and the expanse of the tropical oceans to spend it in, what does one do? A group of Australians has recently published a massive paper that might be useful in this regard. It is entitled "Review of Research Relevant to the Conservation of Shallow Tropical Marine Ecosystems." The authors are B.G. Hatcher, R.E. Johannes and A.I. Robertson. It was published in 1989 in the Oceanography and Marine Biology Annual Review.

This document has been of great benefit to ourselves in defining and establishing a logical context for our own research priorities in the Belize Barrier Reef, where we have worked for a decade. Your draft bill is remarkably lucid as it is written and I am certain your staff has already run across the article to which I refer. But, in the event it has been omitted, I shall include it here as Appendix B.

This paper will not only be helpful in the aftermath of the passage of the Reef Research Bill, but I submit that it serves as a powerful testimonial to the worth of what you are trying to do with this legislation.

While I am still making general remarks, let me invoke Charles Darwin. Paragraph 3 of Section 2 of the Reef Bill states that "coral reefs appear to be especially vulnerable to phenomena associated with global climate changes such as rises in global temperature, increased levels of ultra-violet radiation, and sea level changes..." Later, especially in Section 5 of the Bill, it is made clear that the effects of sea level changes on reefs will be among the topics addressed by the new research programs.

Charles Darwin, better known for his contributions to organic evolution, also studied coral reefs. More precisely, he sought insights to the origins of continents and ocean basins by examining coral reefs. In the Pacific, where Darwin did most of his marine work, coral atolls form on the rims of submerged volcanoes. As the ocean floor spreads, the volcano "subsides." To avoid being drawn, however gradually, to a depth where light is insufficient for photosynthesis, the corals must grow upwards at the approximate rate that the volcano is sinking. Darwin determined the speed at which the little coral polyps could form their calcareous shells -- shells which collectively make a reef. Then he drilled down through the ancient reefs and measured their depths. With the two numbers and some magical calculations he was able to speculate rather brilliantly about what we now call continental drift and plate tectonics.

Darwin published on all this in 1848 in a little book called Coral Reefs.

This anecdote has two messages. First, I believe it serves as tacit endorsement of the Coral Reef Environmental Research Act from a pleasing and unexpected source. Second, it clearly indicates that mankind must urgently learn to distinguish between natural and man-induced causes of sea level rise. Darwin's work has already

3

shown that coral reefs can be invaluable living indicators of the health of this planet. We must immediately learn to use them that way, and this Bill certainly helps.

I was flattered to be invited to this hearing based on what was called my "expertise" in the field of coral reef research. Although I did my graduate work on tropical aquatic habitats, in my current post as Regional Coordinator for Mesoamerica and the Caribbean, I oversee field scientists. What I may know about Central America I owe to numerous other individuals, and I hope I can represent their sentiments well on this rare occasion.

Let me offer a suggestion for Central America, for the region from Panama to Mexico, along the Caribbean shore. I have spent a lot of my life there. Today, WCI is sponsoring, or is otherwise involved in, marine conservation in Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. I am very confident that a chain of monitoring stations in each of these countries would be a simple, financially feasible and very rewarding activity for this Bill to support.

Environmental monitoring need not be a costly endeavor, especially when the status quo is no monitoring at all. To be sure, some procedures, like tracing exotic chemicals, can get the researcher into sophisticated laboratory procedures. However, recording water temperatures, currents, suspended sediments, and measuring most basic nutrients are not elaborate procedures at all. It just happens that they are not being done on a regular, sustained basis anywhere in Central America.

If just one carefully designed monitoring program were set up in each of the coral reef complexes of Central America, and if these simple programs were maintained for a reasonable period of time, a priceless data base would be established. One could at last begin to make definitive statements about, for example, the effects of the rampant deforestation of the Caribbean slope of the Central American isthmus. Right now, we mainly guess about all that.

Let me emphasize this point, briefly. Even under the best of circumstances, it is unlikely that any single country in Central America could guarantee the well being of its own, "national" environment. The countries are small. Inadvertently, each of them is currently "exporting" one or more environmental problems to one or more of its neighbors.

I believe that this unique phenomenon is particularly acute in the marine environment. Coastal currents cannot help but carry contaminants to neighboring national waters. In addition, the life histories of species of economic or conservation concern, whether the conch, the grouper, the manatee, or the sea turtle, invariably encompass the waters of more than one country. Species in the vast invertebrate fauna of the coral reef reproduce, more often than not, by broadcasting sperm and