A reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary
A reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. New rules for the troubled reefs and turquoise waters that make up the vast marine sanctuary that surrounds the Florida Keys are threatening to spark a Conch-style uprising.
More than a thousand residents showed up at a Key West meeting in September to review the plan that expands boundaries at the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and increases restrictions on a park that helps pump $4 billion into the state economy. At a Key West City Commission meeting earlier this month, critics complained the rules might be grounds for another rebellion.
“A 21-mile traffic jam started the Conch rebellion,” Key West attorney David Paul Horan said, referring to the 1982 stand-off with federal officials. “This is way beyond a 21-mile traffic jam.”
Horan – a founding member of the Conch Republic who led the legal battle to unsnarl a traffic jam caused when U.S. Border Patrol agents set up a checkpoint to snare illegal immigrants – complained that the preferred plan backed by sanctuary officials risks crowding out some areas of the park by restricting access to many others.
The plan calls for increasing the number of preserves – established to protect environmental resources like reefs and seagrass, shipwrecks or other archeological sites – from 57 to nearly 100. Restrictions within the zones vary from limited access for motorized boats to anchoring rules.
“Feeding fish in your canal is going to get you in trouble. Night fishing using the mooring buoys, it’s prohibited. Twenty-nine years later, [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] has suddenly realized that bait-fishing is no longer ‘consistent with sanctuary goals and objectives,’” Horan complained. “Common sense is lacking and all these new no-access, no-entry zones.”
But sanctuary officials and conservationists argue additional restrictions are needed to protect a 2,900-square nautical mile area – which houses the largest inshore reef tract in the U.S. – from growing threats.
An unprecedented new disease outbreak that first appeared off Virginia Key in 2014 has traveled down the tract past Key West, decimating many of the boulder coral that help build the reef. Increasing ocean temperatures also threaten to worsen bleaching events. Increased boat traffic is also threatening seagrass beds.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, more than 30,000 of the 1.4 million acres of seagrass in Monroe County have been scarred by boat propellers ripping into grass. The meadows provide not only important habitat for bonefish and other sportfish that draw anglers from around the world, but a menagerie of birds, including ospreys, roseate spoonbills and pelicans.
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