White, J.

Abstract:

St. Eustatius National Parks Foundation (STENAPA) is the only active environmental non-government organization on St. Eustatius, and was legislated in 1996 with a mandate from the Island Government to protect and manage the island’s marine resources. St. Eustatius Marine Park was established in 1996 and became actively managed in 1997 to conserve and protect the marine environment surrounding the island from the high water line up to and including the 30 meter (100 feet) depth contour. The marine environment of St. Eustatius supports 27.5 km2 of biologically diverse coral reef, seagrass, sandy seabed and open ocean communities. The Marine Park is one of the top 5 sites in the Caribbean to see healthy coral and fish populations. The 2 reserves have 43% hard coral cover and the Protected Area is a home, migratory stop over or breeding site for 14 IUCN Red List species, 10 CITES Appendix I species and 98 Appendix II species.

St Eustatius Marine Park attracts around 500 yacht visitors and 2500 diving/snorkeling visitors per year contributing to income for the 70% of the islands population employed in restaurants, hotels and other services1. Other uses of St Eustatius Marine Park are for Fisheries (25 fishermen use the waters of St Eustatius) and in excess of 1000 tankers a year using the oil storage facility at Statia Terminals NV. Anchoring is the main threat to the marine resources caused by the operations of Statia Terminals NV, although pollution is also an important issue with sewage and other wastes including ballast waters entering St Eustatius Marine Park waters from vessels.

Field work carried out involving survey dives, stakeholder consultation and photographic records found that significant damage has been done to the reefs within and beyond the designated anchoring zones for the vessels using Statia Terminals NV. The main impacts of the damage are:

Direct impacts:

• Broken individual coral colonies
• Structural damage to the reefs
• Sedimentation

Secondary impacts:

• Decreased fisheries production for subsistence, commercial and sport fishing.
• Decrease in dive tourism, and related activities.
• Change in community structure
• Ciguatoxic (poisonous) fish
• Decreased recruitment and coral larvae survivorship

Management Recommendations:

Recommendations to manage the anchoring issues are:

• Install a Vessel Monitoring System with alerts to unsustainable practices.
• Monitor the current status, ongoing damage and recovery of the coral reefs
• Establish a protocol for response and restoration after damage has occurred. 

Abstract:

St. Eustatius Marine Park was established in 1996 and became actively managed in 1997 to conserve and protect the marine environment. It consists of a general use area and two no-take reserves. The purpose of this study is to collect baseline data regarding fish stock populations within the marine park and its reserves in order to evaluate the success or otherwise of the environmental management strategies of the Marine Park. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted with eleven fishermen on the island in order to learn more about the St. Eustatius fisheries and to examine changes that have taken place within the last ten years. A visual fish census of the coral reefs was also carried out at sixteen dive sites. The abundance and diversity of fish species were observed, along with length estimations in order to determine the standing stock and population size structure of specific species. The Southern Reserve of the Marine Park was observed as having the most abundant fish population and on average, between twenty and thirty species were observed at each of the dive sites surveyed. Blair’s Reef was identified as being the most diverse with over thirty-five species being observed. The diversity of the fish population in St. Eustatius has been proven to have increased dramatically in the last thirteen years, with the number of species currently present in the waters being on average 4.9 times greater than the number observed in 1992 at the same locations. When asked about the changes in the coral reefs and the fish populations over the past ten years, half of the fishermen said they saw no changes, while the other half said they had seen positive changes, citing more fish and less anchor damage. This clearly indicates that the establishment of the Marine Park nine years ago has been beneficial to the fish population within the local waters. 

Evolutionary theory predicts that male and female offspring should be produced at a 1:1 ratio, but this may rarely be the case for species in which sex is determined during incubation by temperature, such as marine turtles. Estimates of primary sex ratio suggest that marine turtle sex ratios are highly skewed, with up to 9 females per male. We captured juvenile hawksbill turtles Eretmochelys imbricata in waters around Anegada, British Virgin Islands, a regionally important foraging aggregation, and analysed concentrations of plasma testosterone and oestradiol-17β from 62 turtles to estimate sex ratio. There were 2.4 to 7.7 times more females than males. Testosterone concentrations correlated with sampling date and sea surface temperature (SST), with higher concentrations in the late summer when SST was highest, suggesting that assigning sex through threshold values of sex hormones must be carried out cautiously. The sex ratio in the juvenile foraging aggregation around Anegada is more male biased than at other locations, suggesting that turtles at Anegada have resilience against feminising effects of climate change. Future work should (1) integrate the relative contributions of different genetic stocks to foraging aggregations and (2) investigate the annual and seasonal cycles of sex hormones, and differences among individuals and life history stages.