Eyes on the water in Belize

Once a sleepy fishing community, Placencia Village has now become one of Belize’s most important tourist destinations. A scrappy mix of dive shops, hotels, and restaurants—including an Italian gelateria that has done good business for almost 15 years—abounds along the colorful main road, which terminates at a lively dock.

Miralda works in tourism as well (among her many jobs, she’s a tour guide and dive master) but like many Placencians, she sees unchecked tourism development as a danger. “There’s a lot changing,” she says, pointing south toward the horizon. “Especially with what they’re doing over there.”

She’s referring to two small, linked islands, located about three miles off the shores of Placencia, called Harvest Caye. From a distance, it’s not too different from other small islands (or cayes) in the waters off the peninsula, but up close a distinct picture emerges. New channels carved into the island divide and fragment the stands of mangrove forest, while a squad of excavators pull rocks out of the sea to build a seawall, and a handful of unfinished cabañas are rising in order to greet the tourists who will soon be coming in numbers Placencia has never seen.

In the past couple of years, the crew of locals, long-term expats, and recent transplants who live in Placencia and around the lagoon have witnessed the project firsthand: The muddy island construction site will eventually host a cruise port with shops, beach, marina, and a floating deepwater pier, as well as a mainland landing site for inland tours to explore nearby jungle and Mayan sites.

The love of manatees came late to Nicole Auil Gomez. The very first thing that prompted her to study and protect them, she says, was learning of the dire need to understand them better.

In college in the early 1990s, she learned that, along with Chetumal Bay in Mexico, the coast of Belize was one of the most important areas for the manatee’s Antillean subspecies. “But no-body seemed to be doing any work on them,” she says. “It was a gap, and for me it was like, ‘Man, are you kidding? Belize has the most Antillean manatees in the world and we do nothing?’”

So, with a grant from WWF’s Russell E. Train Education for Nature program, Gomez completed a master’s degree in wildlife management from Texas A&M University, focusing on manatee abundance and trends in Belize. She then returned to her native country ready to save them. Gomez led SEA from early 2013 to January 2016, and now serves as country program director for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Belize. But manatees remain close to her heart.

While sailing the lagoon under a rumpled gray-blue sky, she climbs up the boat’s bow, scans the calm water, and stays silent. She’s searching for manatees, and she knows exactly what signs to watch for. “We’re looking for a boil in the water: a smooth and shiny circle that pops up,” she says. “We should also look out for a mud trail, which means an animal is swimming away pretty fast, or a trail of leaves, shoots, and roots, which means someone’s just had a feast.”

As we go deeper into the mangroves, the engine of the motor boat shuts down. A school of fish hide in the tangle of roots that appear underneath, and dragonflies begin to swarm all around.

Finding manatees can be hard if they don’t want to be seen. Especially in Placencia Lagoon, where the water is dark and manatee numbers have fluctuated over the years. Illegal hunting for their meat is still practiced in southern Belize, and watercraft collisions are greatly reducing the population. There is also another manatee-related worry on many people’s minds: shrimp farms.

One of the challenges is the high number of fishers that come to Placencia. A stream of locals claim that illegal fishing vessels from northern Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras are competing with native Placencians, creating conflicts and emptying the reef. But it’s not as simple as good fishers versus bad fishers. “It’s poverty,” Gomez says.

Economic hardship is readily apparent. While Placencia is thriving, it has a scrappy, in-progress feel. And everyone seems to have multiple jobs to make ends meet. Many local fishers have, like Emelly Miralda, switched gears to tourism—especially when fish are less abundant or when the fishing season is closed. Others, like her cousins (and Villamar’s sons) Lewis and Lowell Godfrey, are taking control of their future with a less ordinary alternative: seaweed farming.

“We’re not sure [seaweed farming] is the best [option], but it is an alternative, and we need to try something different,” says their brother Dale Godfrey, an environmental activist.

So along with other fishers who think alike, Lewis and Lowell established a cooperative to help them make a living out of seaweed. Today, they sell the dried, filamentous red algae they grow in underwater farms located near the reef to both foreign and local consumers who use the product for everything from soaps and facial masks to soups and beverages. One of those buyers is Magda Morales, owner of a small restaurant that sits adjacent to Placencia Village’s dock and beach.

Morales has a brisk manner and a loud voice that contrast with her warm smile. She has run the place for over 10 years. “I’m not gonna make myself rich, but I can’t complain,” she laughs. The specialty of the house? Seaweed shakes, which tourists buy the most.

The best thing about the seaweed, she says, is that “it doesn’t need pesticides or fertilizers. All it needs is a healthy reef.”

Laughing Bird Caye is a tiny island. There’s not much to see on the ground, but under the water it’s clear why it was declared a national park. The place simply oozes life. A seemingly infinite school of tiny silver fish travel from beach to coral fields, where green, yellow, and red “stoplight” parrotfish swim and spiny lobsters hide within a forest of staghorn and elkhorn corals. As marine biologist Lisa Carne describes it, that abundance is hard-earned.

In 2001, one of the most devastating hurricanes that Belize has known, Hurricane Iris, hit Placencia directly and tore up the tiny island. “Everybody [heard] that Laughing Bird Caye was dead,” Carne says.

At the time, she was working in northern Belize, where she kept finding fragments of coral—broken-off, but still alive. And since she knew that corals live in high-energy, shallow areas where waves and storms regularly break pieces off, she also knew that they were adapted to survive such physical disturbance (think of taking cuttings from plants to grow new ones).

“When a broken-off piece tumbles around and gets secured in the reef,” she explains, “it can live and grow into a new individual.” That’s the case with the elkhorn and staghorn corals, which are among the fastest growing reef-building corals.

So Carne decided to replenish Laughing Bird Caye—not by creating an artificial reef, but by putting back the same kinds of corals that used to be there and helping them regrow. To make it happen, she founded the nonprofit Fragments of Hope in 2013.

As Carne dives in the reef, she points at two corals that she and locals transplanted years ago. They’re both elkhorns, and yet despite belonging to the same species they look clearly different, one of them with thicker branches than the other. Fostering different individuals like these is one way to make the coral population genetically diverse, work that WWF has strengthened by funding lab analyses of coral genetics at the project site. A diverse coral community is more likely to weather intense storms and changing ocean temperatures. Eventually, it will also be able to sexually reproduce on its own, an achievement that Fragments of Hope documented for the first time in 2014.

The ultimate goal is not only to have a diverse coral community, Carne explains, but a diverse reef ecosystem. “It’s not just a matter of putting back a few species,” she says. “We’re actually increasing the biodiversity of the entire area by providing a habitat that other species need.”

Having that kind of knowledge allowed the team to model what would happen by 2025 if the country chose from among different scenarios for managing its coastal resources and the natural buffers that protect its coast. For example, the study found that a full-on development scenario (think unchecked industrial fishing, tourism, agriculture, and oil and gas exploration) would destroy Belize’s coastal resources, while on the other hand a full-on conservation scenario (think setting aside huge swaths of protected areas in perpetuity) would not allow people to make a viable living from natural resources.

“What emerged through our modeling was this sort of middle-of-the-road, more informed management future that blended the two extremes together,” says geographer Gregg Verutes, a Natural Capital staff member based at Stanford. It offers a more viable long-term scenario, he explains, that “blends conservation goals with an understanding of people’s need for coastal development.” (Think mangrove-friendly landscaping, community-supported fishing regulations, and multiple-use areas where wildlife is protected along with local community rights.) This third option quickly gained ground.

The Natural Capital team worked with government officials from CZMAI to analyze these different scenarios, and an integrated coastal management plan was developed. After nearly 10 years of research, advocacy, and revision, Belize’s government officially adopted the plan on February 22, 2016, and intends to reduce the area of habitat at risk by 20%, while expanding economic opportunities for residents of Belize’s coast.

Back in the lagoon, Emelly Miralda pulls the rope again, but the net comes out of the water empty. “Every day is a fishing day, but not every day we catch fish,” she says with a smile.

When asked how long she’s been fishing, she points at her 7-year-old daughter and says she was about that age when she went on her first fishing trip, “and I never stopped since then.”

That lifelong connection to the water is why she fishes as often as possible, she explains, and guides tourists to see the reef. It’s also why she volunteers with SEA. “Once everything is gone,” she says, “trying to put it back is kind of impossible. So why not preserve it while it’s here?"