My name is Ballantine, Bill Ballantine. I am a marine biologist working at the University of Auckland's Marine Laboratory near Leigh. For many years now I have been promoting the idea of marine reserves and this talk is about what's happened so far and what we might do next.

New Zealand's first marine reserve was established in 1977 on the coast alongside the Leigh Laboratory. The original idea was to provide undisturbed conditions so that scientists and research students could make observations without any interference. But the ideas proved useful and popular in many other ways. Marine Reserves are places where there's no fishing. Not just no commercial fishing with large trawlers, or longliners or scallop dredges, but no fishing at all... by anyone for anything by any method. They are also places where other methods of human interference is not permitted: no marinas, no reclamations and no sewage schemes. Quite simply, marine reserves are places in the sea where the habitats and their life are left natural and undisturbed by people. They are thus very useful places to measure natural processes IN the sea. Alistair McDiarmid could relocate the same crayfish for many years at Leigh, whereas outside the reserve, any legal sized crayfish would be caught before the end of the year. Averyl Ayling measured growth rates in Finger Sponges in the reserve in 1978. One of the tagged specimens was still exactly 19 cm  high when she came back 15 years later.

Now since the marine life develops fully, even in the shallows, marine reserves are good places for education. With very litle effort, people of alll ages can go and see for themselves. Marine reserves offer a chance to explain and interpret the range of marine habitats and communities. Not just the fish but the seaweeds, the crabs, the sponges, the currents, the tides and the rocks. Education doesn't have to be formal - some of it is an appreciation of heritage. Marine reserves are good places for the next generation of citizens to learn about their inheritance And places where anyone can observe the marine life for pure fun and recreation.

Pieces of the sea CAN be used intensively for production and in more crowded parts of the world most of the coast is fully occupied with marine farms and industries. Tourists from such places particularly enjoy visiting natural and undisturbed coasts. In New Zealand people regard the sea as a wild and natural place where the inhabitants look after themselves. But in fact there are no natural refuges anymore, not even in wild water far from land. Large trawlers regularly trawl to a thousand metres in such places, hauling on board with their powerful winches whatever's down there.
We are very active and clever in extracting anything we want from the sea. But we should now consider the sea not just as a source for fish and something to be used, when we feel like it, but as a system, a complex whose processes must be maintained if we're to keep on using the results. New Zealand could lead in this. Ours is the most maritime country in the world. We live at the centre of the water hemisphere. Our half of the world is 90 percent sea. We have more coastline than most, NZ is surrounded by more marine habitats than most, and our marine ecosystems have great diversity, stretching from the sub-antarctic to the sub-tropical.

Even in NZ though, it is difficult to learn about the sea and how to manage it sensibly: virtually all marine habitats are out of sight; the sea's surface is a visual barrier. You cannot look at marine habitats in the same way you can look at forests and grasslands and swamps on land. We can get some idea by looking at the emergent bits of the coast in aerial photographs. This is the Wairau bar in Marlborough. It's low in relief, sediment-dominated and it's got a large estuary. In contrast, Nugget Point in Otago has steep topography: It's mainly bedrock. And the sub-tidal conditions on these two coasts are likely to be just as different.
Even if you dived to look, the distance you can see in any direction under water is very limited. And any general view and overall picture has to be pieced together from many separate dives and bit-samples. Furthermore, the organisms down there are often unfamiliar in type. We can think reasonably about fish from land experience but when you get to things like Sponges and Bryozoans, filtering microscopic Phytoplankton, we need completely new principles.

Mostly we shrug off our ignorance about the sea and either organise some more fishing or just amuse ourselves. There's nothing wrong with playing with the Dolphins, but if it's really a different world down there and we have very little idea of what most of it does, or how it all works, and whether this matters, we should probably be careful to keep some natural and in tact, at least until we find out.
Back in the sixties, some members of the University of Auckland felt so strongly about this that they spent twelve years persuading their fellows and citizens to make the first Marine Reserve, which extends for five kilometres along the coast from Cape Rodney to Okakari Point (near Leigh). The rules of this reserve are very simple: No killing, no removals and as little disturbance as possible, while everyone was welcome to come and look. Surprisingly, many people did want to come and look. Indeed the place is now so popular, this alone suggests we might make some more.

The second marine reserve was set up around the Poor Knights Islands in 1981. These islands, off the Northland coast, lie in the path of warm, clear currents and provide excellent diving, where you can look at special and brightly coloured fish and the prolific life on the steep underwater cliffs. The Knights are a very special place.

The third marine reserve was even more unusual. In 1991 a large marine reserve was declared around the Kermadec Islands. These are well North of NZ and their volcanic mountains, thousands of metres above the seabed but whose tips barely show. No-one lives there permanently and the place is so isolated that their populations of Spotted Black Groper, almost fished out in most places, still have individuals as large as a diver and much older. The kermadecs are almost tropical and have true corals, Crown-of -thorn starfish, and a wealth of other species not found elsewhere in NZ. Special and far-off marine reserves are fine but what about typical and representative reserves, even when there's no marine laboratory alongside?

Peter Daniels, the ranger on Kapiti Island, raised this question in 1987. Kapiti is close to Wellington in the cold waters of Cook Strait, and a favourite fishing place for many people. But after a lot of discussion and quite heated debate, in 1991 a significant part of its coastal waters was declared the fourth marine reserve.

The Maori trustees of Mayor Island in the Western Bay of Plenty, asked for a full marine reserve for the Northern part of the island and a control on bulk fishing around the rest. There was relatively little objection and the proposals were approved in 1992. It's to be hoped that this was not too late in the day. Earlier the big game fishing lodge on the island had been abandoned and commercial fishing had apparently collapsed. Underwater surveys made for the reserve proposal showed, there was relatively little fish life left.

At Hahei on the Coromandel Peninsula the marine reserve proposal by the Department of Conservation had its boundary chopped twice, trying to accommodate strong objections from some local residents and a few holiday home owners. All the directly accessible beach in some of the Eastern waters were left out of the reserve but this didn't satisfy all the objectors. Fish life here was more abundant but not very diverse.

While some people are still worrying bout their claims to fish anywhere they want, others are becoming concerned about sustaining the stocks and maintaining the diversity of reef fish.
Diving clubs in the Marlborough Sounds proposed a small marine reserve round Long Island, (it's the spot in the top right hand corner of this aerial photograph). This was very public-spirited of them but
the area proposed is very small and it is unlikely to have much effect as a stock refuge or as a breeding ground.

In Fiordland, the Federation of Commercial Fishermen proposed that the Northern half of Milford Sound be made a marine reserve. And this was approved in 1993. Black Corals and other normal deep water fauna reach the shallows in Fiordland, apparently because the place is shaded by a semi-transparent layer of fresh water, coloured with tannins from the forest run-off. Scientists, divers and conservationists were pleased by the commercial fishermen's initiative, but this was tempered slightly by the fact that Milford Sound was the one fiord already closed to commercial fishing.

In Auckland, almost isolated by the North-western motorway, is an area known as Pollen Island. It consists of shell banks, which house Fernbirds and other rare things, as well as a lot of small mangroves, and some Cockle flats. The Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society which was moving into marine conservation, proposed this as a marine reserve. They argued that keeping a natural bit of a harbour in the centre of the city was just as sensible and worthwhile as having some natural parks on land.

As I record this in December 1993, eleven marine reserves have been approved. But more proposals are coming in all the time, as more and more people favour the idea for various reasons.
The proposal at Kaikoura has a lot to do with eco-tourism: whale watching, diving with seals and dolphins, and generally observing the magnificent sealife, is now an important economic activity there.

At Long Bay in Auckland the proposed reserve is adjacent to a very popular regional park and to an outdoor education centre that teaches many pupils to swim and snorkel and canoe.

In the past we've shown great energy and initiative in developing parts of our coasts: the container port, industrial sites and waterfront complex at Wellington is a good example. But cities need planning in the sea as well as on land. Just outside the harbour, Wellington sewage is poured raw into the sea. Begun years ago as a cheap system of disposal, the present situation offends many people but it will not be easy to remedy.

As we develop more and more of the coast, especially for residence and holidays, we need to develop policies for subdivisions, for marinas, for waste disposal, and this is being done. A draft New zealand Coastal Policy has been produced under the Resource Management Act and it provides guidelines for such matters. But it barely mentions marine reserves and has no policy for where and when there should be more. I feel strongly that marine planning should look just as clearly at marine conservation as it does at marine development. All marine habitats, whether they are visible like mangroves, or out of sight like most of them, should have sensible policies. If we can think up guidelines for marinas and sewage discharges, we should be able to work out some sensible principles for marine reserves.

People do enjoy natural marine habitats without exploiting them. This is healthy, it is entertaining, it's educational and it is cheap and easy, provided we keep some. This set of non-destructive uses should have a genuine priority. But at present we only recognise exploitive uses in the sea and we put these into two separate brackets: The Department of Conservation is responsible for the coastal policy but  this deals only with water quality and the physical environment. Theoretically the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries is in charge of all marine life but actually it only deals with exploited species, whether these are fished or grown by aquaculture. Fisheries policy, like the coastal policy barely mentions marine reserves. But it would make sense to have them in both policies. Fisheries interests not only need to know where they can fish in the future, they also need some breeding stocks to ensure the catch.

Red Moki are naturally slow-growing, long-lived fish. And large Red Moki that form the main breeders, are now rare outside the marine reserve. Crayfish are twenty times more common in the marine reserve at Leigh than outside, due to the intense fishing pressures outside. The Crayfish in the reserve are older and larger and heavier. The larvae from the five kilometres inside the reserve are greater than that of the next hundred kilometres. The reserve is effectively a stud farm for Crayfish. A network of reserves, representing all the habitats in all the regions would serve as stock support and a general insurance for all species.

At Whangara, North of Gisborne, local Maori groups are looking at a marine reserve to support and restore their Kai-moana. It's hard to gain any clear idea of natural population levels even for non-target species. Places such as White Island were to some extent relieved of fishing pressures by distance off-shore, by their volcanic activity and the fact that the Airforce used to bomb the local reef for practice. (Volckner Rocks). The marine life there seems much richer but it is not clear whether this is a remnant of previous general conditions or whether it was always very special. In almost all cases we have no surveys of any kind before fishing and other exploitation became wide-spread and intense. Even on the sub-antarctic islands where there has been great interest in the marine mammals and marine birds, virtually the only marine science in the sea has been basic charting and collecting, sufficient to make up some species lists. This photograph was taken at one of the very few dives ever made on Bounty Islands. Faced with these levels of ignorance, even of what is there, it would be reasonable to establish some no-take areas, at least until we can raise the energy to look properly.

We probably need to re-examine our basic assumptions. Successive seventh form geography classes at Kamo High School have been trying to establish some marine reserves in Whangarei Harbour, including round this island, Motukuroro. They've been making little surveys, issuing questionnaires, holding public meetings and lobbying their local politicians. The younger you are, the more all this matters, because the longer you'll have to live with the results. Marine habitats are different. They have their own special beauty. If you're not yet cynical, this alone would suggest that keeping some natural would be like keeping Kauri trees and Kiwi. We should not just play favourites, however - Seal pups are warm and cuddly; they match our ideas of 'cute' - but Blue Cod are probably just as important in the scheme of things. As we struggle to determine the web of food chains and energy flows - and we're on a steep learning curve, even for the fundamental processes - we should remain fairly cautious. Fishing is extremely popular and there's always a market for fish. We're very good at it, for fun, for food and for profit. It really doesn't need much encouragement. What does need encouragement and care are the breeding stocks, the feeding grounds and the ecostystems that support these.
When our children look into the sea, will they be sad at what's left, or proud of what we conserved and sustained? Since 1980 I've been saying that NZ should have a network of marine reserves, representing all the habitats and comprising at least ten percent of all the habitats and all the regions. Despite seven new marine reserves in the past few years, we're still a long way from there. But while scientists are allowed to give their opinions, decisions on the public domain, including the sea, must be made by all the people through the public democratic process. So YOU should consider what YOU think is sensible and appropriate!

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