Marine protected area

And I think that's really important when people have hope for coral.

Now, yesterday we talked about marine protected areas as nature reserves of the sea and why most people couldn't name one.

If you listen to it, I gave you a bit of an exercise to find out like what the marine protected area near you is and what was in it and all that kind of stuff.

But today it's all about what those reserves actually do when things go wrong.

Around the world, sharks and rays have declined by 71% since 1970, mostly from overfishing.

Now, you might be thinking, like, sure, that works in the middle of nowhere with no people.

But what about places where people live and fish every day? And for that, we have to go to the southern tip of Africa, one of the oldest marine protected areas on the continent.

On South Africa's southern coast, there's a stretch of rocky shoreline called Siksikama.

But local activists and small-scale fishermen battled hard to protect their coastline.

coastline here is dotted with beds of one of britain's most biodiverse and carbon-rich habitats a 9 000 year old pink seaweed called merle some of which are a mile long this rare fragile and threatened seaweed produces hard coral-like skeletons that provide nurseries for scallops and fish 10 years ago Divers and local fishermen ran a successful campaign to have scallop dredging banned by law in a 230 square mile zone now designated as a Marine Protected Area, MPA.

And now they are witnessing a dramatic revival of marine life.

The transformation of a seabed damaged by decades of dredging has allowed the recovery of scallop populations, and it has ended the territorial battles between huge industrial dredge fishing boats and smaller local boats.

Now that dredging has been banned, it's not just the catch that's improved, but the general health of the seabed.

And the length of the scalloping season has increased as well.

The dredge ban in this Marine Protected Area, MPA, set up to protect the slow-growing merle habitats and other marine features has protected the merle to a massive extent.

If scalloped dredgers had spent the last 10 years going up and down this coast, the habitat would be obliterated.

A few years ago, an aquarium in South Africa asked its visitors a pretty simple question.

Can you name one marine protected area? And these were people who had spent their day off looking at fish, as you do in an aquarium.

And a lot of them came up blank.

They just couldn't name that MPA.

And we're gonna talk about Why that is on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.

And I want to ask you a question.

Name one marine protected area in your country.

Go.

much from the work that I did for the PhD, but when I was doing the research on our visitors' understanding of marine protected areas, that was very interesting because we were asking them what they thought about marine protected areas, how much they supported marine protected areas, etc.

And when we asked them to name a marine protected area, they named one of the aquariums.

And that helped me to realize just how different people perceive what we do.

And I think my biggest learning from my PhD is that we all see the world through our own lenses and that our visitors are coming with such different perceptions.

We can't get away from it, but we've got to try and simplify it if we're going to communicate it.

And that's what we've tried to do with the project at the B&O Waterfront in Cape Town.

But then what you were describing in terms of that coral reef is looking very much like a marine protected area, which is where you actually have the entire ecosystem and the ecosystem is in balance.

We're finding some of the work that scientists at Rhodes have been doing in the Tsitsikama Marine Protected Area, which is one of our oldest MPAs in South Africa, is that the fish in that MPA are actually more resilient.