Written by: Alexandra Puritz, M.S. Candidate, Marine Ecosystems & Society, University of Miami's Rosentiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science

This past June, I participated on a CubaMar expedition to Cuba’s Isle of Youth. As a graduate student at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, I am collaborating with CubaMar to research marine protected areas (MPAs) in Cuba. Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean, and its shores are comprised of diverse marine ecosystems including coral reefs and seagrass beds. To protect these marine environments, Cuba has developed an extensive national network of MPAs. The main objective of our journey was to learn about and participate in the community-based conservation projects taking place in Cocodrilo. Cocodrilo is a remote fishing town located on the southern coast of the island within a Protected Area for Managed resources and it is the closest community to Punta Frances National Park, which is an MPA located off the southwestern tip of the island.

The Isle of Youth is a very unique island. Isolated from mainland Cuba, the Isle of Youth seems like an almost forgotten place. On the cobblestone streets of Nueva Gerona, the island’s provincial capital, you are more likely to see horse-drawn carriages or motorcycles than cars. The history of the Isle of Youth reads like a historical adventure novel. The island’s past visitors include Christopher Columbus, Spanish colonists, pirates, and American settlers. Most notably, in 1953 Fidel and Raul Castro were imprisoned by then-president Gerardo Machado on the island’s jail, called Presidio Modelo, which is now a museum. Following the Cuban Revolution, Castro renamed the island the Isle of Youth, which had previously been called the Isle of Pines. The new name commemorated his initiative to turn the island into an international destination for young people to learn about the ideals of socialism. Dozens of boarding schools were built across the island for students from all over the world to attend. However, during Cuba’s economic depression known as the ‘Special Period’ following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the schools were shut down. To this day, when driving around the northwestern portion of the island, you can’t help but notice these abandoned and ominous Soviet-looking buildings. For an in-depth read on the island’s history, check out this Washington Post article.

​The coastal town of Cocodrilo can be reached by a roughly 2-hour taxi ride or a 4-hour public bus ride from Nueva Gerona. In order to enter through the protected area, we needed to receive special permits from the Cuban Government and had to cross through a military checkpoint. Once through the checkpoint, as the road winds its way through the Lanier Swamp it becomes extremely bumpy and overpopulated with enormous coconut crabs. At the end of our trip when we passed back through this military checkpoint, young soldiers inspected our bags to make sure nobody illegally took turtle shell out of the protected area.
 
The Cocodrilo community was founded by Cayman turtle fishermen in the early 1900s, and to this day the Cayman influence remains. The houses have a Cayman architectural style and it was a surprise to be greeted in English by a woman whose ancestors were among the original founders of the town. Fishing is still the main livelihood for the majority of the residents, although in 2008 the Cuban Government banned the sea turtle fishery.

During our stay in Cocodrilo, our hosts El Nene and Rey taught us about their marine conservation efforts in the community.  According to them, Cocodrilo’s coastal ecosystems can be considered the town’s most valuable assets, and they hope to encourage young people to conserve their marine resources. In particular, they hope to promote non-extractive ways to use these resources, such as through education and ecotourism. One of their current projects is a coral restoration nursery for staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis), which is an endangered coral species. In addition, our group participated in a youth-focused sea turtle festival led by the town’s leaders, which encouraged a sense of pride in conserving Cuba’s sea turtle populations. Children played games that taught them values relating to conservation, such as a paper version of Go Fish where they could only take fish above a certain size limit. Ultimately, projects such as these demonstrate the ways in which communities can be engaged in non-extractive ways of appreciating their marine resources. A longer-term goal for Cocodrilo’s conservationists is for the town to develop a niche in ecotourism, which would benefit both the environment and the community by providing an economic alternative to fishing and incentivizing conservation.

​To learn more about Cocodrilo and future volunteer opportunities for supporting their environmental education initiatives, visit: http://www.cubamar.org/volunteer-in-cocodrilo.html.

Daria Siciliano, PhD, CubaMar, The Ocean Foundation

At the end of June I had the pleasure and privilege to attend the 13th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS), the premier conference for coral reef scientists from all over the world held every four years. I attended my first ICRS presenting as a PhD student in October 2000 in Bali, Indonesia. I was then a wide-eyed grad student hungry to fulfill my curiosity of all things coral reefs – and that first ICRS conference allowed me to soak it all in and fill my mind with many more questions to investigate in the years to come. It consolidated my career path like no other professional meeting during my graduate school years, even including the 10th ICRS I attended four years later in Okinawa. The Bali meeting -the people I met there, what I learned- is when it became clear to me that studying coral reefs for the rest of my life would indeed be the most fulfilling profession. Fast forward 16 years, and I am living that dream to the fullest, as a coral reef ecologist for the Cuba Marine Research and Conservation Program (CubaMar, http://www.cubamar.org/) of The Ocean Foundation. I am at the same time leveraging the amazing laboratory and analytical resources of the Institute of Marine Sciences of the University of California Santa Cruz, as an associate researcher, to carry out the lab work needed for our investigations on Cuban coral reefs.

The ICRS meeting last month, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, was also a bit of a homecoming. Prior to devoting myself to the relatively understudied and endlessly fascinating coral reefs of Cuba, I spent more than 15 years studying Pacific coral reefs. Many of those years were dedicated to exploring the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands archipelago, now called the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the boundaries of which the Pew Charitable Trust is currently petitioning for an expansion. They were in fact gathering signatures for this endeavor at the ICRS meeting last month (https://www.facebook.com/ExpandPMNM/). I signed their petition enthusiastically, and also had a chance to reminisce about many underwater adventures in that fascinating archipelago with former colleagues, collaborators and friends I ran into at the conference. Some I hadn’t seen for a decade or more, some were still based in Hawaii, others had moved on, and it was just great to catch up with everyone. 

With 14 concurrent sessions from 8am to well past 6pm featuring back-to-back talks on topics ranging from geology and paleoecology of coral reefs to coral reproduction to coral genomics, I spent ample time before each day planning my schedule to maximize the number of talks I could attend. Each night I plotted the next day’s itinerary carefully, estimating the time it would take me to walk from one session hall to the other, sometimes at the opposite end of the Hawaii Convention center, determining which was the shortest route there… (I am after all a scientist). Luckily the ICRS organizers put out a conference app to facilitate our planning. And I indeed managed to attend many interesting presentations as I had planned - more on this below. But what often messed up my careful plan was the simple fact that these large meetings are as much about running into old and new colleagues walking from one talk to the next, and taking the time to catch up, as it is to actually hear the scheduled presentations. And so we did. With my colleague Fernando Bretos, Director of CubaMar and the person who has worked the longest in the US on bridging the gap between Cuban and American coral reef science and study the two countries’ shared marine resources, we had many fruitful meetings, many of them unplanned. We met with Cuban colleagues we brought to the meeting, as well as with coral restoration start-up enthusiasts interested in work in Cuba (yes, such a start-up actually exists! Check it out: http://www.coralvita.co/), plus grad students we are mentoring, and seasoned coral reef scientists from the Caribbean and Pacific circles interested in collaborating. These meetings ended up being some of the highlight of the conference. But of course there were tons of interesting talks. On the first day of the conference, I mostly stuck around the biogeochemistry and paleoecology sessions, given that one of our current research lines at CubaMar is the reconstruction of past climate and anthropogenic input to Cuban coral reefs using geochemical techniques on coral cores (http://www.cubamar.org/paleoclimate-reconstructions-in-cuba-inferred-from-coral-core-aragonite.html). But I did manage to make it to a talk that day on the pollution from personal care products such as sunscreen lotions and soaps. The presentation went deep into the chemistry and toxicology of common use products, such as oxybenzone from sunscreens, and demonstrating the toxic effects they have on coral, sea urchin embryos, and larvae of fish and shrimp. I learned that the pollution stems not just from the products washing off from our skin as we bathe in the ocean, but especially from what we absorb through the skin and excrete in urine, eventually making their way to the reef. I’ve known about this issue for years, but it was the first time I actually saw the toxicology data for corals and other reef organisms - it was quite sobering.

One of the dominant themes of the conference was the unprecedented global coral bleaching event that the world’s reefs are currently experiencing. The current episode of coral bleaching started in mid-2014, making it the longest and most widespread coral bleaching event on record, as NOAA declared. Regionally, it has affected the Great Barrier Reef to an unprecedented level as well. Terry Hughes from James Cook University in Australia presented very recent analyses on the mass bleaching event for the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) that occurred earlier this year. Severe and widespread bleaching occurred in Australia as a result of the summer sea surface (SSF) temperatures from February to April 2016. The resulting mass bleaching event hit the remote northern sector of the GBR the hardest: from aerial surveys complemented and corroborated by underwater surveys, Dr. Hughes determined that 81% of the reefs in the remote Northern sector of the GBR have been severely bleached, with only 1% escaping untouched. In the Central and Southern sector the severely bleached reefs represented 33% and 1% respectively. The 2016 mass bleaching event is the third occurring on the GBR (previous ones happened in 1998 and 2002), but it is by far the most severe: hundreds of reefs have bleached for the first time in 2016. During the two previous mass bleaching events, the remote and pristine Northern GBR was spared and considered to be a refugium for bleaching, with its many large, long-lived coral colonies – but it’s clearly not the case today, and many of those long-lived colonies have been lost. Due to these losses “the Northern GBR will not look like it did in February 2016 any more in our lifetimes” said Hughes. Why was the Southern sector of the GBR spared this year? Dr. Hughes showed a slide detailing the path of cyclone Winston in February 2016 (the same that swept through Fiji and wreaked havoc there): it landed on the southern GBR and brought the SST down considerably there, thereby mitigating the bleaching effects. To this Dr. Hughes added sarcastically: “We used to worry about cyclones on reefs, now we hope for them!” Dr. Hughes concluded with more discouraging news: the two lessons learned from the third mass bleaching event on the GBR is that local management doesn’t ameliorate bleaching; and that local interventions may help foster (partial) recovery, but stressed that reefs simply cannot be “climate-proofed”. Finally, he reminded us that we have already entered an era when the return time of mass bleaching caused by global warming is shorter than the recovery time of long-lived coral assemblages. Thus the GBR has changed forever. Sigh.

In a more uplifting talk later in the week, Dr. Jeremy Jackson reported on results from analyses spanning from 1970 to 2012 from the wider Caribbean, and determined instead that local stressors trump global stressors in this region… these results support the hypothesis that local protections can increase reef resilience in the short term pending global action on climate change. In his plenary talk, Dr. Peter Mumby of the University of Queensland reminded us about the “subtlety” in coral reefs. The cumulative effects of multiple stressors are reducing the diversity of reef environments, so that management interventions are targeted at reefs that no longer differ dramatically. Management actions have to adapt to said subtlety in coral reefs.
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By Friday, the last day of the conference, I noticed that there were still thousands of people at the conference. Usually, by day 4 or 5 of any 5-day conference, lots of people start to drop out, some getting a head start to their long trips home, others preferring to take their last opportunity to check out a local MPA or surf spot. But at this conference attendance remained strong. The lionfish session on Friday was still pretty well attended. I was pleased to realize that the biotic resistance hypothesis, whereby native predators, by either competition or predation or both, are capable of maintaining the lionfish invasion in check, is still being actively debated. That’s what we tested in Jardines de la Reina MPA in southern Cuba during the summer of 2014 (http://www.cubamar.org/pez-leoacuten-the-lionfish-invasion-mitigation-project.html). It is interesting to learn it is still a timely question.

Compared to the first ICRS meeting I was able to attend in Bali in 2000, the 13th ICRS was equally as inspiring, but in a different way. Some of the most inspiring moments of this conference personally happened when I would run into some of the “elders” of coral reef science, who were prominent or plenary speakers at the 9th ICRS in Bali, and today I could still see a twinkle in their eye as they talked about their favorite corals, fish, MPAs, zooxanthellae, or the most recent El Niño. Some well past retirement age… but still having so much fun studying coral reefs. Who would want to do anything else?!

Written by: Katie Thompson, CubaMar Program Coordinator

What can fishers from Madagascar and Mexico learn from each other? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot! Last week I was invited to attend a fisheries learning exchange in Baja California, Mexico organized by Blue Ventures, ProNatura, and SmartFish. The exchange brought three fishers from Madagascar to Mexico with the objective of learning how fishers from Bahía de Los Angeles in the Gulf of California manage their octopus fisheries. The fishers from Madagascar also got a chance to share how successful their community octopus fishery closures have been in Southwest Madagascar.

During the exchange we toured a fish market in Ensenada, saw a mussel and oyster farm off the Pacific coast, got a close up look at how fishers from Bahía de Los Angeles fish for octopus, attended a local fishers’ meeting, and saw how the octopus is processed and shipped. The fishers from Madagascar were eager to learn more about the octopus traps used by Mexican fishers (in Madagascar they use spears) and the Mexican fishers were surprised to learn about the important role women play in the Madagascar octopus fisheries (women make up about 70% of the octopus fishers in Southwest Madagascar, where in Bahía de los Angeles its almost 0%). Throughout the entire week it was clear participants were learning a lot from each other, even though most conversations required multiple translations (Malagasy to French to Spanish and sometimes English). It’s amazing how much knowledge can be gained just by getting in-person, hands-on experience.

My main interest in fisheries learning exchanges comes from a research perspective. Exchanges were the topic of my master’s thesis and I’ve been able to continue research and implementation of exchanges through my work at CubaMar. The research is part of an effort started at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center a few years ago, of which CubaMar’s Director Fernando Bretos is also a part. CubaMar has used exchanges in the past, specifically in our sea turtle research and conservation work. Check out our recent paper in Marine Policy on an exchange CubaMar organized on sea turtle conservation!

After 55 years of political isolation, change is afoot in relations between the US and Cuba. After the December 17, 2014 announcement by Presidents Barrack Obama and Raul Castro to normalize relations between the US and Cuba, CubaMar has found itself in a unique position to advance joint marine research between our countries. Yet even before the 2014 announcement, CubaMar had been hard at work building bridges through marine science through the Trinational Initiative (TNI), a collaborative platform founded by CubaMar, Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies (HRI) and the Cuban Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment in 2007. Through this platform, every year, scientists from the three countries that share the Gulf of Mexico (Cuba, Mexico and USA) have met to discuss research plans and chart the course forward for targeted research projects that help solve some of the regional problems facing the Gulf of Mexico and Western Caribbean. The last TNI meeting took place in November 2015 in Havana and had the largest participation since this platform was established in 2007.
 
The first week of May CubaMar, in collaboration with our partners at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and HRI, organized a workshop that brought together again members of the Coral Reef Working Group of the Trinational Initiative. Twenty-eight participants from the U.S., México, and Cuba representing 14 different government agencies, NGOs, and academic institutions met to define coral reef research priorities for the Gulf of Mexico and Western Caribbean region. The workshop was hosted by UNAM and funded by HRI and CubaMar.

By Katie Thompson, CMRC Program Coordinator
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Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud, or Isle of Youth, had always been described to me as a remote, beautiful, and curious place. It has a unique history and some of the country’s most untouched natural environments. I was able to visit the island last month as part of a scouting trip for future CMRC projects.
 
Just getting to the Isle of Youth is part of the adventure. The plane is Soviet-made from the 1960s or 70s and it was the first plane I ever boarded from a dropdown staircase in the rear. With one window every third seat the inside was slightly claustrophobic. Fortunately I was able to snag a window seat and watched the passing Cuban countryside below—large cement apartment buildings and small towns scattered among the many farms.

​Upon arrival to Nueva Gerona, the major city on the Isle of Youth, I took a taxi to Hotel El Colony on the west coast of the island where I was staying. On the way we passed by grown-over fields of grapefruit trees, which was once the island's major source of income. We also passed what looked like large factories from afar but were actually the remnants of international boarding schools that once held students from African, Asian, and Latin American countries in the 1970s. (For a great overview of the island’s various development stages and unique history, see the article Cuba's Island of Broken Dreams by Nick Miroff of the Washington Post.)
 
Today, the tourists that make it to the Isle of Youth are mostly divers headed for one of the dozens of dive sites off of Punta Francés. I was able to go diving myself and see why the adventurous tourists make the trek. The crystal clear waters and healthy reefs were worth the trip. Not to mention the most delicious fresh lobster we had for lunch--it melted in my mouth and was exactly what I wanted after a day of diving.

I then headed to Cocodrilo, a small fishing village on the southern tip of the island.  CMRC has a long-time relationship with Cocodrilo and CMRC’s director Fernando Bretos had always told me how wonderful the place was. It was founded in the 19th century by families from the Cayman Islands and there are still a few residents who are native English speakers.
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Just like getting to the island, getting to Cocodrilo was also an adventure. I had to receive special permission from the Cuban government to enter the town. The trip was long (2 hours on a bumpy road in a 1948 truck) but well worth it. It was immediately clear why Fernando had always talked so highly of the place.  
 
When I arrived I was received with open arms and fed a delicious meal of fish and congri (beans and rice). CMRC first began working in Cocodrilo in 2011 when we helped start local sea turtle conservation festivals. I was pleased to find out that Cocodrilo has continued to run the festivals even without our support. Evelio, the town’s mayor, couldn’t stop talking about next year’s festival and his plans to invite children from other communities. The growth of these festivals is significant considering fishers from Cocodrilo were catching sea turtles less than 10 years ago.

​At the time I couldn’t tell what was different about my conversations with people in Cocodrilo as opposed to my conversations with people on other parts of the island. There was something about Cocodrilo I couldn’t put my finger on until writing this post. It's now clear, based on my experience, that on the rest of the island there is a focus on what was--people kept talking about what the island used to have. In Cocodrilo, however, the people continuously talk about the future, always looking ahead at what could be.
 
I headed back to Havana on the same plane on which I arrived after spending a 16 hour flight delay on the beach. Going to the Isle of Youth allowed me to learn a little more about a truly unique part of Cuba—I hope it’s the first trip of many.

It was immediately obvious we were in Cuba and not some other Latin America country I was familiar with when we stepped outside of the airport and there was old car after old car dropping people off (The rumors are true! There are a lot of old cars!). My first glimpse into the Cuban system was from our taxi driver when he told us he was an engineer but was working as a cab driver since driving a taxi paid more than any job he could get as an engineer. Driving the taxi even paid more than his wife’s job as a doctor! I couldn’t believe it. He went on to explain how the government owned practically everything—the taxi cabs, hotels, even the cows. This was the first of many memorable conversations I would have over the course of my 48-hour trip.

The next day we visited our colleagues at CIM (Centro de Investigaciones Marinas, essentially University of Havana’s Marine Research Institute) where, despite the lack of air-conditioning in 85°F+ weather and equipment typical to any scientific lab in the U.S., these people were doing amazing, groundbreaking work. In fact, when we were there two scientists were ecstatic to announce their publication of a book on Cuba’s algae—a huge achievement that was a very long time  in the making. I was extremely impressed.

After our meetings at CIM, I took an almendrón (an old car that’s a cheap, shared taxi—something everyone should do if you visit Havana!). I was crammed into a car with five other passengers, and, yes, I felt like I was in a movie. The car was from the 1950’s (except the stereo, which had recently been replaced in order to play the ever so popular reggaeton). In route to Havana Vieja, we passed smaller buildings with colonial architecture scattered among tall buildings with soviet architecture. It was a strange mix and all needed repair from decades of use and no to little restoration.

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