Scientist says tourism activity must be regulated
PANAJI
The National Institute of Oceanography has strongly advocated the need to urgently declare the Grande Island and its vicinity a protected area and regulate tourism around the popular island.
NIO researcher Dr Baban Ingole who led a team of researchers on an ongoing study, has been studying the health of the coral ecosystem at Grande Island, located off the port of Mormugao and the Vasco headland.
“The area has to be declared a protected area. We are willing to furnish all our data to the Goa government or any other authority if need be. Ideally this should be dealt with by the forest department of the Government of Goa,” Ingole told The Goan.
The study titled Community structure and coral health status across the depth gradients of Grande Island, published recently in the marine magazine Marine Science is part of a PhD by one Manikandan Ravindran.
The studies are ongoing and more diving expeditions are expected after the monsoon.
However, threats to the corals, no matter how few, are ever present especially at Grande and the surrounding island.
"Potential threats to the corals in Grande Island include diseases and competition posed by and sponges. An average of 53.2% of the live corals were affected by algal turf intrusion, 2.7% by boring sponges and 2.6% by other diseases which includes white plaque disease and trematodiasis. Intensive tourism activities in coral reef areas are also found to elevate the presence of diseases among corals,” Ingole said in his study.
“The link between tourism activities and prevalence of these diseases among corals in Grande Island needs further investigation,” he however added.
“Tourist activity including leisure fishing and dolphin trips need to be regulated. We are not saying stop it altogether, but it cannot be allowed to carry on without any control,” Ingole said adding that the vacuum created by the uncertainty of who has control over the islands and activities therein was fuelling the lack of regulation.
The corals which are a huge tourist draw, however, are not as grand as those located in other parts of the West Coast.
“The generic richness of corals in Grande Island is comparatively lower than the other major reefs along the west coast of India. The coral formations around Grande Island are uneven in their distribution, as the maximum coral cover was observed in the mid-shelf zone.
There is no continuous reef like structure and dense patches of corals were found in very few locations around Grande Island,” the study notes.
Nonetheless, the intensive tourism activities around the island have led to turbidity in the water, dropping anchors, sometimes right upon the corals and even fishing in the fish rich water could upset the ‘natural balance’.
Various factors such as availability of light, sedimentation, salinity and availability of a base are responsible for the presence and strength of corals.
