Lider Sucre, the executive director of the National Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON), spoke to the Panama Audubon Society on March 14 about the ecology of Coiba Island. The island and its surrounding waters were declared a national park in 1991 and attract a growing number of tourists who are interested in its wildlife.

Coiba, best known for the penal colony there, is an island slightly larger than Barbados that's set among coral reefs off the coast of Veraguas. It has several species and subspecies that have evolved in isolation from their relatives on the isthmus. "It's a small ecosystem in which the wildlife has developed differently," Sucre explained, noting for the birding enthusiasts the guacamaya bandera, a macaw found only on Coiba, and genetic differences between Coiba's ñequis and howler monkeys and those found in the rest of Panama.

Sucre called the island "the best uninhabited tropical forest left in the Americas," but pointed out that the greatest ecological treasures are in the waters offshore, which boast "the most extensive reefs on the Pacific side of the Americas." Those reefs, and the mangroves which nourish them, attract abundant fish, including Panama's densest concentration of large sharks. "People scuba dive to see the sharks," Sucre said. "It's one of the great attractions." So are the marine mammals, including several species of whales and dolphins.

Those marine attractions, however, also bring unwanted visitors. Sucre said that the shark population has drastically declined due to commercial fishing operations that catch the predators, cut off their fins for sale to Chinese restaurants, then throw the fish back in the water to die. He also noted the predations of illegal commercial longliners, "ghost nets" that continue to kill fish and mammals long after they have been abandoned and damage that poaching shrimpers do to the area's coral formations. He added that while the larger scale operators present a persistent law enforcement problem around Coiba as well as in other Panamanian territorial waters, the larger long term threat comes from small artesanal fishing boats from the poverty stricken communities along the Veraguas coast opposite from the island.

"If people are very poor, they will be disposed to strip nearby natural resources," Sucre argued, and he said that the best ways to deal with that problem are economic. The core of the conservation strategy he advocates is tourism that benefits nearby coastal communities. "It's important that local people be the owners of the hotels and other tourist developments," he opined. On the law enforcement side of handling the problem, Sucre urged a larger fuel budget for the National Maritime Service (SMN) patrol boats and the authorization of police other than the SMN to make arrests for poaching and other crimes committed on the water.

As an initial step toward implementing any of these policies, Sucre said it will be necessary to conduct a national educational campaign to raise awareness of the wealth that's at stake on and around Coiba. A longer term goal is to set up a foundation that has the necessary resources to defend Coiba's wildlife, regardless of the political ebbs and flows of the national budget.

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