The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Senior Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

NINETY percent of coral reefs off Grand Bahama have been devastated by the lethal stony coral tissue loss disease – SCTLD –  which threatens to ravage much of The Bahamas’ corals, affecting livelihoods and making the country less safe from storms.

Rochelle Newbold, director of environmental planning and protection, suggested yesterday the problem is significant enough that some Bahamians should begin rethinking career paths that focus on marine systems.

“When those systems collapse, we have no more protection and then if we have a climate change situation, these things are just going to roll right up on shore and then we’re gonna see increasing devastation beyond that which we saw with Grand Bahama and Abaco with Dorian,” she said during a press briefing at the Office of the Prime Minister.

 “But we’ll also see it and feel it economically when the reefs are lost, these persons whose base economies are centred around the fisheries, there will be nothing for them to do. Where do they then move into now? Which sector will be able to take them on? These are the things that I’m talking about when I say we need to educate our kids about options that extend beyond the traditional things that we know about. This also applies to us as the adults that we need to see how we expand, curtail, change the way we are doing things in terms of our career and our livelihoods.”

 Ms Newbold said there is no current cure for the coral disease.

 “We thought about COVID in 2020, well we have a COVID of the sea and that is affecting our reefs at a rate of 50 meters per day, killing the reef,” she said. “The reef has fundamentally been tied to the lifeblood of The Bahamas and the Bahamian people. Everybody got a brother, father, uncle, cousin, somebody who is in the fishing business and the more south you go the more prominently involved are people with the issues of the fisheries and the marine resources.”

 She said the disease has been documented throughout the country, not just in Grand Bahama where 90 percent of reefs have been devastated.

 “The government of The Bahamas sought to engage a scientific team to go ahead and look at what’s going on and try to make recommendations for how this can be addressed,” she said. “We know that our neighbour to the south has had it from 2014 and what they have done, they have cut out their reefs and put them in their aquariums because this is how ferocious this is. How is this disease transported? By water. It’s in water and it’s transported by water.

 “What we need to be very cognizant about and there’s been public education material shared with the fishermen, the divers, dive operators. We cannot afford to dive on a sick reef and seek then to go onto a healthy reef because by virtue of the equipment and the gear that we would’ve dived with the sick reef, we will now be transporting this to the healthy reef and now this healthy reef will be starting to decay and to die.

 “There is no known cure for it, there is no vaccine for it and scientists are feverishly trying to figure out what it is, is it a bacteria, is it a fungus, is it a virus, we do not know. And so how are we going to treat it? There are several tests that are in operation in terms of trying to treat it to see if they can stop it. There are some corals that seem to be resilient to it, some that are resistant to it and how do we then utilise those to try to stem this tide of total reef loss? Keep in mind that reefs function like the forests of the sea. It’s not one pine tree that creates a forest, it’s a diversity of things, that’s what makes it robust and strong and then the reefs contribute to our fisheries. It contributes to our protection from hurricanes.”

 Ms Newbold said a coral gene bank workshop was held last week to discuss the issue and is in discussion with the Atlantis resort about how to protect the reefs.

 She said: “What the government is seeking to do, but maybe we can’t because of the fact that we have the largest expanse of marine area in this region, we can’t go about cutting up reefs and moving them into aquariums because we only have one aquarium and that would be Atlantis. So we are in direct discussions with Atlantis about how they can partner with the government as well as other private sector entities, scientists and donors about how they can help us cure and protect our reefs.”