home to virgin赏析

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Home to virgin reefs,rare sharks and vast numbers of exotic

fish,the Coral Sea is a unique haven of biodiversity off the

northeastern coast of a proposal by the Australian

government goes ahead,the region will also become the world’s largest marine protected area,with restrictions or bans on

fishing,mining and marine farming.

The Coral Sea reserve would cover almost 990000 square

kilometers and stretch as far as 1100 kilometers from the

ed recently by environment minister Tony Burke,the

proposal would be the last in a series of proposed marine

reserves around Australia’s coast.

But the scheme is attracting criticism from scientists and

conservation groups,who argue that the government hasn’t gone

far enough in protecting the Coral Sea,or in other marine

reserves in the coastal network.

Hugh Possingham,director of the Centre of Excellence for

Environmental Decisions at the University of Queensland points

out that little more than half of the Coral Sea reserve is

proposed as“no take”area in which all fishing would be

world’s largest existing marine reserve established

last year by the British government in the Indian Ocean,spans

554000 km and is a no-take zone alliance of

campaigning conversation groups argues that more of the Coral

Sea should receive this level of protection.

“I would like to have seen more protection for coral reefs,”says Terry Hughes,director of the Centre of Excellence for

Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in

than 20 of them would be outside the no-take area and vulnerable

to catch-and-release fishing.

As Nature went to press,the Australian government had not

responded to specific criticisms of the Robin Beaman,a

marine geologist at James Cook Univest says that the reserve

does“broadly protect the range of habitats”in the sea.“I can

testify to the huge effort that government agencies and other

organizations have put into trying to understand the ecological

values of this vast area.”he says.

Reserves proposed earlier this year for Australia’s

southwestern and northwestern coastal regions have also been

criticized for failing to give habitats adequate

August,173 marine scientists signed an open letter to the

government saying they were“greatly concerned”that the

proposals for the southwestern region had not been based on the

core science principles of reserves—the protected regions

were not,for instance,representative of all the habitats in the

region,they said.