FORT PIERCE — About 15 miles off the coast of Fort Pierce, deep beneath the ocean's surface, lies the Oculina Reef, a unique ecosystem that supports a wide variety of marine life.
Mark Perry, executive director of the Florida Oceanographic Society, said the deepwater reef provides important habitat for several species of fish and invertebrates.
"It just occupies this wonderful space in deep water, which is the nursery ground and breeding ground for a lot of our grouper, snapper, other species, and hundreds and hundreds of invertebrates like shrimp and crabs and all kinds of things. It's a fabulous living reef," he said.
The reefs are found exclusively off Florida's coast and nowhere else in the world. Their ecological value led to special protections more than 40 years ago that restricted fishing activities that could damage them.
Perry said those protections are now facing potential changes that could allow fishing practices that threaten the reef.
"It was one of the first U.S. marine protected areas on the east coast. And it was protected to keep that intact, all that biodiversity and that huge value of that deepwater reef from any kind of fishing activity that would cause damage," he said. "But right now there's being threats to amending these protections to allow shrimp trawling and other kind of fishery that would damage the reef."
Trawling involves dragging heavy nets across the ocean floor in an effort to catch species such as rock shrimp and fish. Perry said the practice can physically damage the reef itself.
"By trawling and pulling it along the bottom, of course, you run over these reefs and break off all these corals and it turns the coral reef into just a big pile of rubble," he said.
The reef's slow growth makes damage from trawling particularly difficult to reverse.
"It takes hundreds and hundreds of years. I mean, they can estimate some of these reefs are maybe even close to a thousand years old," he said. "That's the problem. They take a long time to grow. And if you start destroying them in a very short time, you can destroy a whole bunch of them. Then it's going to take a long time to recover if they do recover."
Perry said damage to the Oculina Reef could also affect marine life beyond the reef itself. Juvenile grouper and snapper move from the reef into nearby estuaries, connecting the deepwater ecosystem to local fisheries.
The potential consequences could also extend to businesses and communities tied to recreational fishing and boating, he said.
"You're going to be experiencing it because of the economy that all of that brings. The boating and the coastal communities that are formed because of these people wanting to explore these reefs and look at these reef systems are just really, really going to suffer. So that'll make the entire kind of coastal community economy suffer," he said. "It's a degradation of one of our truly unique and national as well as Florida resources."
NOAA is accepting public comments on the proposed changes through Nov. 17.