Volunteers from Port-au-Prince begin training for a team of eco-divers that will be responsible for surveying, and perhaps one day helping save, Haiti's endangered coral reefs. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/wo...er=rss&emc=rss


THIS IS A LINK TO A INTERESTING VIDEO THAT WONT POST HERE
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/...tis-reefs.html

Months after the earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, this nation’s capital, Mr. Hodgson flew to Haiti to inspect reefs, checking for quake damage. Instead, he found something more alarming: dead coral as far as the eye could see, and almost no fish. He estimates that about 85 percent of the coral reef has died.
In Haiti 54,000 fishermen rely on the ocean for their livelihood, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, which oversees fisheries management. In recent decades, as their usual catches of Nassau groupers and snappers have dwindled and disappeared, many of them have subsisted by netting and spearing small reef fish that keep coral clean of algae. Now those too are almost gone, and the algae have taken over.
On a recent dive near La Gonāve Island, Mr. Hodgson floated through a wasteland of intact, dead coral, overgrown with algae and sponges and nearly devoid of fish.