Some of these fish will stay in the reserve and grow up, but many of their offspring will spillover into fishing areas and will be caught, so boosting catches. By not fishing in an area you give the coral reefs and other types of habitat a chance to recover from past damage and to grow more healthily. This in turn gives the fish and other animals a healthier place to live. Healthier fish will produce more eggs and more baby fish. In places where there is intensive fishing the coral reef changes for the worse.
Some types of fish disappear and their loss can lead to overgrowth of corals by seaweeds.
This reduces the numbers of fish the reef can support and leads to declining catches. Marine reserves help prevent these harmful changes from happening and so foster productive fisheries. We can look at how quickly the fish grow, how healthy the stocks of that fish are and how they are being affected by fishing. We used it to weigh whole catches, to pass fish between boats and to keep catches from different places separate when we were measuring fish. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the fishers in the SMMA for their co-operation and support of this study and we look forward to meeting them all again when we come back with the results of the study.