Damaging Coral Reefs While Diving

All around the world divers are inadvertently damaging the reefs when they dive. This mainly happen when divers swim too close to the coral. Divers sometimes accidentally kick or grab at the coral, breaking pieces of it off. Dragging equipment beneath you can sometimes brush against the reef. (Like underwater cameras or other high end equipment.) The biggest problem however is boats which anchor in the more shallow areas of the reefs, therefore brushing against it.

Because scuba diving has become such a popular pastime and the ability to access so many exotic locations has become the norm, it is begging the question "how much damage are we causing the coral reefs?"

This is proving to be quite a concern in some of the more remote locations where a number of divers are showing a complete lack of etiquette or don't have the experience needed to control their buoyancy. In the Caribbean there are over 300,000 dives per year around Grand Cayman. What do we, as divers, need to know? Is the local government, where the diving takes place, doing enough to protect the marine life? Are tourism and the protection of the ocean mutually exclusive?

What a lot of people are unaware of is that coral is not just a pretty, colourful rock in the ocean. It is a living organism. Yes, it has a hard outer skeleton and grows in what would seem to be abundance, supporting many other forms of marine life, but the reef in its entirety is also a living being. Coral has a fine membrane that covers the outside of the hard skeleton. When the membrane is punctured - which only takes a brush against it - it opens the coral up to infection from algae, bacteria or even fungi, much the same as when we cut ourselves.

As the number of divers grows at around 20% per year, it has become more and more critical that we find out just how much is too much? While many popular diving destinations rely on the numbers of tourists, taking a diving package vacation to boost their gross domestic product, they are also realizing that the balance between the tourism which contributes to their annual revenue and the danger of wiping out the one thing which brings the tourists to them, is a very real one.

One of the ways that scuba divers are trying to combat the impact on reefs is to "spread the load". This means that the amount of dives in each specific area is limited. At present the dive areas are very unbalanced with some areas bearing the heaviest impact. By limiting the number of annual dives they hope the reefs will be able to recover from the damage inflicted unwittingly by novice divers.

Yet more damage is caused by ships and boats, passing too close to reefs or dragging their anchors. Environmental changes have also been shown to cause damage to reefs, but it has tended to be the kind of damage that the coral is able to recover itself from. So far, other than a slap on the wrist or minor fines, there has been no effective punishment for damaging to coral reefs. Hopefully this will change in the near future, but in the mean time, be aware of your surroundings and watch were that anchor goes!