Twenty miles off the coast of Florida, stretching from Daytona Beach down to Ft. Pierce, close to the edge of the continental shelf, deep-water coral reefs of Oculina varicosa, or the ivory tree coral (Figure 1), lie 150 to 300 feet beneath the water’s surface. Oculina are quite unique, the only known stand of their variety in the world. As such, in 1984, the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, under the advice and guidance of NOAA Fisheries, designated a 92-square-nautical-mile portion of these reefs as the Oculina Habitat Area of Particular Concern (Oculina HAPC). In 1994, the Oculina HAPC was closed to all manner of bottom fishing and was designated as the Experimental Oculina Research Reserve. In 2000, the area was expanded to 300-square-nautical-miles and prohibited all gears that caused mechanical disruption to the habitat.
Walk into a bait shop along the coast of Florida, though, and odds are the fishing map you pull from the rack will have little or no indication of the Oculina HAPC, no mention of fishing restrictions and no acknowledgement of an area closed to specific types of fishing. And that’s a problem.
It certainly doesn’t make John Reed’s job any easier. Reed is a marine scientist with the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution (HBOI) in Ft. Pierce, Florida. In spring of 2003, Reed served as co-principal investigator on an eight-day expedition led by NOAA's Undersea Research Program (NURP) Center at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, in collaboration with NOAA Fisheries and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The purpose of the mission was to learn more about the Oculina reefs. Reed has been studying Oculina for 25 years. It was he, in fact, who nominated the Oculina reefs as an HAPC.
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