This is not paradise. It’s a typical Sunday for many people in Palau, an archipelago nation in Micronesia.
“We would go to the Rock Islands, spend a couple of nights there, and we would go fishing,” recalled Fabio Siksei, a fisheries specialist with Palau’s Bureau of Marine Resources, about growing up near the country’s famed Rock Islands Southern Lagoon. “Most Palauan kids have almost the same experiences growing up.”
People in Palau, a small nation with a population of about 20,000, consume more wild fish per capita than nearly any other country in the world. But in recent years, populations of rabbit fish and other staples of their cultural diet began to dwindle because of a combination of factors, including increasing food demand and changing ocean conditions.
To meet the country’s need for food supplies and keep traditions alive for future generations, Siksei and others are working with international scientists to build sustainable aquaculture farms in the ocean. Their projects are using NASA’s satellites to help protect the nation’s pristine waters, coral reefs, and shorelines.
“We found that fish stocks were declining due to [our waters] being unable to produce enough to maintain the population of the fish, and that was reason enough for the fishermen to start thinking about management issues,” Siksei said. “We talked with fishermen about ensuring that our fish are there and our resources are there, also about ensuring that our culture continues to thrive for generations to come, because fish is a big part of our life.”
With more than 300 small islands amounting to a landmass about twice the size of Washington D.C., Palau is one of the tiniest nations in the world. Surrounded by a 200-mile radius of scenic ocean and coral reefs that make for a scuba diver’s paradise, the country’s economy relies primarily on tourism and fishing.
But even though tourism serves as an important driver for the economy, Palau’s islands are under pressure to provide the resources to sustain the hundreds of thousands of people who visit the country in normal, non-pandemic times, Siksei said.
For several years, Siksei and others in Palau have been working with scientists at The Nature Conservancy to manage the aquaculture sector and find the best locations within Palauan shores to build marine aquaculture farms necessary to meet future food production needs.
The idea, Siksei said, is to breed fish and shellfish without disrupting marine ecosystems and other aspects of the country’s nature, culture and economy. For that, the team is focusing on rabbit fish and giant clams, two types of seafood entrenched within the cultural history of the nation.
“We don’t want to stop people from fishing or stop people from doing what they usually do,” Siksei explained. “We’re trying to find a way where they can continue to make a living and enjoy these resources.”
As part of a nation that cherishes its natural resources, the government and fishermen of Palau teamed up with scientists at the Nature Conservancy more than 30 years ago to establish marine protected areas, improve the management of fisheries, and meet other environmental and societal needs.
In its early stages, the collaboration included conversations with aquaculture farmers who needed to gain a better understanding about the circulation of the ocean, the ideal distance to farm from the shore, and other parameters that can make aquaculture economically and environmentally viable for the country.
The team is also integrating several layers of satellite data into maps that the people of Palau can use to assess their objectives when setting up aquaculture farms. In recent years, the team also secured support from NASA’s Earth Science Applied Sciences Program, and is now producing interactive mapping tools Palauans can use to identify areas that can serve as a better fit for sustainable aquaculture.
Marine aquaculture has much more potential to be sustainable than other forms of animal protein production, said Robert Jones, who leads The Nature Conservancy’s global aquaculture program. But when done the wrong way, farms situated in the ocean can put more stress on marine ecosystems. Preventing that problem is one of the key goals that the project seeks to address.
“Almost every coastal country in the world has an aquaculture development plan, and all of them are saying we need to boost production to meet increased demand for animal protein and seafood,” Jones said. “But there’s so few people who actually know how to do the right industry planning and siting work to ensure the environment is protected while achieving development goals.”
If done with inappropriate procedures, aquaculture can lead to poor water quality near Palau’s shores. That’s especially significant for fish farms, since fish also produce waste that can muddy the water and change ocean conditions, blocking some of the sunlight that organisms like coral need to survive.
“If you have fish in a pen, they poop,” Jones said about the cage or net system used in aquaculture farms. “If we have coral in the proximity of that plume coming out of the fish pen, that can really damage [the coral’s] ability to survive. It puts further stresses on the coral that’s already experiencing [stress] from climate change.”