New rules, no-fishing zone for Biscayne National Park

Having Miami as a next-door neighbor has taken a severe toll on the 270-square-mile Biscayne National Park over the last three decades. Over-fishing has slammed stocks — more than 70 percent of 17 species are down — while anchors, traps lines and heavy boat traffic have crushed corals and raked seagrass meadows. More than 11,000 prop scars mar flats. Only six percent of its reefs remain.

The National Park Service will unveil a new general management plan intended to start reversing the decline with a suite of new rules for visitors that will, for the first time, include a controversial “no-fishing” marine reserve.

LINK (via: The Miami Herlad)

Needless to say the Keep America Fishing wing of the American Sportfishing Association is not happy about the proposed no fishing marine reserve.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article23137869.html#storylink=cpy

Extending north of San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge, the sanctuaries will now be permanently off-limits to drilling

The Obama Administration has announced plans to nearly triple the size of two major marine sanctuaries off the coast of Northern California. After more than a decade of public comment and research by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary will expand from 529 square miles to 1,286 square miles and the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary will expand from 1,282 square miles to 3,295 square miles. Together, the two sanctuaries will be nearly the size of Connecticut. When combined with the nearby Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a a stretch of more than 150 miles of coastal waters will now be protected.

LINK (via:Think Progress)

Obama's action roughly doubles the amount of marine protected areas worldwide

(NOAA)

President Barack Obama took a historic step yesterday by dramatically expanding an area of the Pacific Ocean that is off limits to fishing and other marine resources development, such as deep-sea mining.

By adding to the existing Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, which was established under former U.S. President George W. Bush in 2009, Obama is expanding it to six times its existing size. This protects an additional 490,000 square miles of ocean waters in and around tropical islands and atolls, including Wake Island, Johnson Atoll, Jarvis Island and others in the south-central Pacific Ocean — one of the most pristine ocean environments under U.S. control. That's about the same size as the states of Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma combined.

LINK (via: Mashable)

The challenge will be keeping poachers out of the newly expanded Pacific marine reserve.

Other vast swathes of the Pacific also came under protection with the tiny island state of Kiribati due to announce that it will ban commercial fishing in one of the last great tuna grounds left in the world.

Kiribati’s no-take zone, around the Phoenix Islands protected area, will cover about 158,000 sq m, about the size of California. It comes into effect in January 2015.

LINK (via:Tech Times)

Something's Fishy

The central Pacific nation of Kiribati, which includes Christmas Island, boasts it has created one of the largest no-fishing marine reserves in the world.

Unfortunately, it’s not true.

LINK (via: Earth Island Journal)

West Is Best: Study Ranks U.S. States for Marine Conservation Progress

Compiling data from MPAtlas.org and MPA.gov; researchers from the Marine Conservation Institute in Seattle, Washington; and Mission Blue calculated the fraction of coastal waters that each state or territory has designated as a no-fishing zone.

Here's the percentage of state waters currently set aside in no-take reserves:

22.9%: Hawaii

8.7%: California

5.7%: U.S. Virgin Islands

1% or less: Florida, Puerto Rico, Oregon, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Washington, American Samoa, North Carolina, Virginia, and Maine.

0%: Alabama, Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire , New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Texas.

While science says that marine reserves help fish stocks recover, recreational fishing interests mobilzed in fierce opposition when California's marine protection areas were first proposed.

So how are those California's marine reserves working?

Six years after California put in place the nation's most expansive network of marine reserves -- a controversial experiment aimed at bringing back crashing populations of fish and other ocean species by creating dozens of "no-fishing zones" along the coast -- the effort appears to be working.

LINK (via: Pasadena Star News)