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Friday, June 29, 2018

5th International Marine Conservation Congress

The monument as proposed in 2008 was very different from what was declared in 2009.
I'm finishing up a great week in Kuching, Malaysia having attended the 5th International Marine Conservation Congress.  I didn't get to all of them, but I tried to participate in as many shark and marine protected area sessions as physically possible (several were taking place simultaneously in different conference rooms).  Notably, I was in the MPA forum led by Jane Lubchenco, the MPA mapping focus group led by Lance Morgan and several others, and I was a speaker in the first ever IMCC Deep Sea Symposium, which was organized by Diva Amon and Andrew Thaler.  I spoke of my experiences with the Mariana Trench and streamed our entire symposium on Facebook (and you can watch it here).  I've pasted the text of my talk below.
Policy in the Deepest Sea
Hello everybody, thank you for coming to my talk on deep sea environmental policy and the Mariana trench.

Megalodon, the largest shark to ever live, has been spotted in the Mariana Trench. No, I’m just kidding. This is a Jason Statham movie coming out in August.

For those of you on Twitter, this would be a good opportunity to tag David Shiffman in a post. Maybe mention mermaids in your tweet.

But all kidding aside, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench there is a huge portal where giant monsters called Kaiju enter from another dimension to attack earth.

Our only defense are giant fighting robots. Oh wait, no, that was the movie Pacific Rim. Again, I’m joking. But I mention these movies to highlight that there is something enigmatic and magical about the Mariana Trench. Most people have heard of it, but can they find it on a map? Do they know about the people who live there? I venture that they don’t, so today I’m going to tell you the REAL story of the Mariana Trench.

I was born in a small village on an island next to the Mariana Trench. Here I am harassing a small island critter, a rite of passage for young island boys.

The Mariana Trench got its name from our islands, which in turn got their name from the Spanish queen who decided our lives would be better if we were Catholic.

The Islands lie in the western pacific where the Pacific Ocean meets the Philippine Sea, east of the Philippines and South of Japan. They stretch from Guam in the south up about 400 miles to Uracus in the North.

The Mariana Trench runs south and east of the islands. The deepest point is southwest of Guam – called Challenger Deep -- and then it arcs east and then north along the point where the Pacific plate – containing the oldest seabed on the planet – slides underneath the Philippine plate.

I don’t think there is any disagreement that THE MARIANA TRENCH IS THE MOST ICONIC DEEPSEA ECOSYSTEM ON THE PLANET. 
At its deepest point the Mariana Trench is just shy of 11 kilometers. This is a mile deeper than Mt. Everest is high. While much of the focus is rightfully on the trench itself, this is a region of incredible underwater geographic diversity, with deep sea, vents, volcanoes, and seamounts, but also islands, coral reefs, and incredibly, places with both vents and coral reefs – one of the few places this occurs.

There may not be giant sharks or aliens,but there are big sharks, small sharks, and things that look a lot like aliens.  And of course robots.  See what I did there?

The world’s deepest living fish was recorded in the Mariana Trench last year. Andrew tells this story better than me, so I’ll let him do it during the Q&A.

There are 29 species of marine mammals in this area, with very high beaked whale diversity – a family of whales that we know almost nothing about. The beaked whales highlight part of what I think makes the Mariana Trench so exciting.

This is a place that has been visited by literally three people: Don Walsh, Jacques Piccard
and James Cameron. There have been more people on the surface of the moon than at the bottom of the Mariana Trench – and there have been more robots crawling the surface of Mars than have been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

As an aside, Star Trek Enterprise Captain Jean Luc Piccard gets his name from the Mariana Trench. Can I get a show of hands of people who knew that?

Globally, estimates are that there are over 2.2 million UNDISCOVERED species living in the ocean , many in the deep sea. To put that number in perspective, science to date has described only 2 million species. Many of these new species will be found on seamounts and sea vents, and the Mariana Trench offers these up by the scores, if not hundreds. There are lifetimes of discovers to be made in this region and in other deep sea areas. 
So what else is down there?

The sad truth, is that we may never know because HUMAN IMPACTS HAVE REACHED THE MARIANA TRENCH 
We’ve reached the point in human history where we can extract resources from every inch of the ocean, and at every depth. When Dr. Amon was exploring the Mariana Trench, her team found this beer can and also this can of SPAM. A few years ago a Japanese team found a plastic bag.

These waters also deal with the same fishing pressures as the rest of the world – from small to large. And sadly, we have political leaders who can’t wait to sell the seafloor to anyone who is willing to mine it. So what can we do about? There has been a lot of talk about marine protected areas at this conference, and what it means to be a protected area. And this is a tool that has been applied to the Mariana Trench, but before I get into that I want to give a little background on the history of conservation in the islands. [SLIDE] The first major point I want to make with this talk is that DISCOVERY LEADS TO PROTECTION 
I imagine that most people in this room believe that conservation should be based on science. After all, that’s why we’re all here at this convention!

But it is important to remember that science is not the only reason for protecting biodiversity. There are other reasons, too, and while it is best to be informed by science, ultimately conservation will come down to values.

As an example, let me tell you how the first environmental protections in the Marianas came about.

In the early 1970s, after nearly 450 years of colonialism, the people of the Marianas were trying to decide what form of colonialism they would enjoy next. Having lived through Spanish, German, and Japanese administrations, we decided on the United States. As we were developing our new territorial government, we sent a team to visit all of the habited and uninhabited islands to take an inventory. 
The team – which included scientists -- returned from their expedition with tales of the wonders of the Island of Maug, which is an active volcano where only the rim peaks above the waves, creating a lagoon surrounded by three small islets (kind of like the volcano from that Pixar Short). The recommendations were basically OH MY GOD THIS ISLAND IS SO COOL WE HAVE TO PROTECT IT. I paraphrased a bit there.
As a result – the framers of our constitution – including my father – enshrined the entire island as a nature reserve. At the time this had nothing to do with the Mariana Trench – but it was the action around which all future marine protected areas and terrestrial protected areas were based on.

Over the years, as the benefits of protection came to be understood, the protections grew, and other islands were added as nature reserves. Uracus. Asuncion. Sarigan. Guguan. Then in 1983 President Reagan declared the American EEZ, and the Mariana Trench came under American jurisdiction.

In 2009, President George W. Bush designated the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument.

I led the community effort to get the designation, running a grassroots campaign that was ultimately successful

Here I am at the signing with some conservation heroes

However, I want to point out the difference between what we asked for, which was a large marine protected area, managed by NOAA sanctuaries, around the islands that our people had for decades decided were important to conservation to what was declared, which was a medium sized marine protected area around those islands and then a benthic protected area for the deepest parts of the mariana trench, plus some benthic protections around 21 undersea volcanoes. This action effectively protected the deepest part of our planet from bottom trawling and deep sea mining. Rather than having sanctuaries manage the area, this is all managed by US Fish and Wildlife and NOAA fisheries. Listening to the experts in Washington, DC over the advice of the local people has led to a whole host of problems. 
10 years since the designation, the implementation has been a disaster. The federal manager, US fish and wildlife service still hasn’t hired a staffer on Saipan and still haven’t put out a management plan. This has created a lot of frustration in the community because the expectations they had at the time of designation have not been met. 
Despite the failings in management, the protection of the Mariana Trench has led to increased global interest in the Mariana Trench.

This leads to the second point of my talk: PROTECTION LEADS TO DISCOVERY
Japanese, Chinese, and American research teams – including my second favorite Trini marine biologist and future Star Trek Captain -- have been visiting the region in record numbers and this is leading to new scientific discoveries.

This has increased our understanding of the region, and has strengthened the case for the need for conservation and to improve the management of the Mariana Trench. In 2016, Dr. Amon and Dr. Thaler helped write papers that were submitted to the Obama Administration to make the case for a Mariana Trench National Marine Sanctuary. The nomination was accepted by the Trump Administration in March 2017, and awaits action. 
As more research takes place and as more data is collected, I believe this will only make our case stronger. So just to recap, conservation has been taking for 40 years in this part of the world, and our first attempt at protecting the Trench isn’t going so well, but we have policy ideas, but the politics make them difficult to implement.

That this should be easy and that it is not is a cautionary tale for protecting the rest of planet’s deep sea. Some scientists have criticized the Mariana Trench protections as low hanging fruit, saying that we protected a place that had no fishing, where there was no political opposition. One would think that the most iconic deep sea habitat on the planet would be easy to protect, but I assure you, it is not.

Thank you.