Fagatele Bay National Marine Sanctuary - Fagatele Bay As A Marine Sanctuary

Fagatele Bay As A Marine Sanctuary

Fagatele Bay National Marine Sanctuary was designated in 1986 in response to a proposal from the American Samoa Government to the National Marine Sanctuary Program. The National Marine Sanctuary Program supports research in all of its 14 sites. Research plays a role in management by supplying information needed to make resource protection decisions based on hard scientific data. Fagatele Bay's most important research project spans over a decade. In the late 1970s, millions of Acanthaster planci or crown-of-thorns starfish (alamea), a coral eating animal, ate their way through Tutuila's reefs. More than 90 percent of all the living corals were destroyed. At the time, Fagatele Bay was not a National Marine Sanctuary, but this disaster propelled the decision for the site's designation.

The National Marine Sanctuary Program protects and preserves nature and local culture. The program is found in areas of special significance such as the oceans and Great Lakes of the United States. There are 14 sanctuaries in the program ranging from Stellwagen Bank off Cape Cod to the Channel Islands in southern California. All manage their precious resources through a combination of education, research, long-term monitoring, regulation and enforcement.

Many different types of fish call this reef home, and as such, many biologists and marine researchers attempt to correlate with the local government in an effort to find new species within the local waters. Many new species have been found, but as it is a marine sanctuary, fish or other marine animals cannot be removed from the ecosystem. Scientists, headed up by Dr. Charles Birkenland, used this natural disaster as a focus of their long-term research: to follow the recovery of a coral reef. Because corals grow slowly, the research team chose a multi-year cycle of data collection. Beginning in 1985, and again in 1988, 1995, 1998, 2001 and 2004, the team amassed information on coral, fishes, invertebrates and marine plants. This database is unique for Samoa and the study is one of the few long-running surveys of its type in the world