杏吧原创

WHEN fishing was banned off Cape Canaveral in 1962 to improve security for
space launches, nobody thought much about what it meant for the fish. But almost
30 years on, the resulting marine no-go zone is being hailed as proof that ocean
nature reserves can be a huge benefit to surrounding fisheries, as well as to
wildlife.

Sports fishers in Florida are catching huge numbers of record-sized trophy
fish in the waters surrounding the Cape Canaveral marine reserve鈥攗p to 12
times as many as elsewhere along the Florida coast, researchers have found.

The world has few marine reserves in which fishing is banned.
Conservationists say they should benefit fish stocks in the wider ocean by
acting as natural hatcheries. But anglers and the fishing industry often oppose
them because there has been little hard evidence that they do what they鈥檙e
supposed to.

The evidence is now clear, says Callum Roberts of the University of York.
鈥淥ur study should remove a major logjam in the debate over marine reserves by
showing that they do support increased fish catches and produce bigger
蹿颈蝉丑.鈥�

Roberts and a team from Britain and the US studied data from the
International Game Fish Association. It shows that with each passing year more
large, slow-growing fish such as black drum and spotted sea trout are being
caught in the surrounding waters.

The same study shows that the more conventional Soufri猫re marine
reserve off the Caribbean island of St Lucia has also been a great success.
Fishing is banned in a third of the island鈥檚 former fishing grounds to conserve
dwindling fish stocks. Yet in the first five years of the Soufri猫re
reserve, islanders鈥� catches have increased by up to 90 per cent.

鈥淢arine reserves are like money in the bank for fishers,鈥� says Fiona Gell,
who co-authored the study.