I would hate to think where the Keys would be without
the assistance of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and what they've
brought to the table with whether it's the protection of all our, you know,
special preservation areas, the mooring ball system
and the list goes on and on.
And the coral cover in
those areas is much higher than we see in a lot of other surrounding areas.
It includes species that have gotten eliminated from many
of the locations within the Florida Keys from stony coral tissue loss disease.
We believe these sites are really, really important to protect
from localized human impacts, because that is one of the ways
that we can help these reefs adapt to climate change.
The most important reason why we don't want to have catch
release fishery in there is to try to sort of standardize our regulations.
It's really, really confusing when you look at all of our different SPAs
and we have different regulations within each one of those.
And so by making all of these areas equivalent,
the original intent of a SPA was to allow people to
it was basically to separate uses
and to protect a lot of the vulnerable species that occur within those areas.
And by having these areas as no take where there's no fishing
allowed at all in those areas, you then protect those populations.
They can they can become more abundant,
grow to a larger size produce more offspring that then can
those offspring can then seed surrounding areas where you can fish.
By establishing these sanctuary preservation areas
we have concentrated the dive community into those areas.
That's the that's the preferred place where most people are going to dive.
And we have put in mooring buoys.
But what we've seen in a lot of cases is there so many visitors
that come to these areas that there's not enough mooring buoys left
and they will then anchor in those areas.
So the bulk of what you see now
out in the sanctuary preservation area are corals that have been grown
in land-based or in-water nurseries and out planted on those reefs.
And what we're seeing happen is a substantial portion of those continue
to get broken up by anchor damage.
And so by preventing anchoring in these areas, we will be able to better
protect these benthic resources, allowing the corals to survive,
continue to grow and repopulate these degraded reefs systems