Coral+Reef+Conservation

Alexandria S. Rachel M. __**Problems+Solutions**__ Thinking of the Coral Reef, you think ‘Oh, hey, its just part of the ocean, were theres lots of coral and little fish. No one bothers it! Its perfectly fine!’ Well its not. For example, bleaching, the paling and whitening of coral, is happening right now. Now that can be caused by human affect, but it can also be natural. Manatees are being killed right before our eyes. On speed boats, people zoom right over them, feeling a little shake, look back, see a grey thing and some red stuff…eh, nothing bad or anything. Fishing nets, they don’t even see them. Well they probably do, and think it tastes like fish so they put it in food too. Well, yeah, that’s all negative, but not everything humans do is bad. Like how the government is making sure that the manatees are being protected, and doing there best to stop water pollution. Well, not everything happens right away, but its been better over there year. One recent problem is someone crashed into the coral reef and spilled oil from his boat, and it killed the whole reef. This shows how careless people can be of the reef.

Two big problems in the Coral Reef are the pollution and overfishing. Pollution is getting to be a bigger problem as urban development continues. It causes erosion resulting in the run-off sediments which eventually reach the reefs. Storm water run off has been carrying fertilizers and sewage in to the ocean, damaging the coral reef. Over fishing is getting to be a bigger problem as the population is increasing, harvest in the need for ocean materials is also. Fisherman have been setting fish traps, killing most of the reefs fish, that are not needed. Since 1950, about one fifth of the world's coral reefs have disppeared.

Pollution is being solved by the NOAA, has brought this to the worlds attention. They have developed technical guidance to state and territory resource managers to review permits for coastal development and modify damaging activities before they happen. They have developed a way of monitering the reefs to make sure that the reefs have not been damaged by pollution. Overfishing has been on it's way to fixing by creating a limit of what and how many fish thats the daily limit per fisherman.

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