And what will happen to the reef if the fish populations don't return?
Certainly nothing good.
Further on in our conversation with Kira Forman Castillo we asked her about the work that reef fish do the maintain the health of their habitat.
She told us that on the reef, as in any eco-system, each creature has its own role to play.
Kira Forman Castillo - Technical Manager, HOL CHAN Marine Reserve
"Each organism has a role that they play, you know from corals to fish, even things like urchins and sea cucumber that you often don't think too much about they all play a very important role in keeping the health. It's like with us, with people. Everybody has a role to play within society. Within the community. So it's the same thing within these ecosystems, the fish populations are very important and some of them are grazers for example look at the Parrott fish as an example as they feed and they remove what we call the macroalgae then the corals can then settle and you have a better coral cover. However, if you don't have the parrot fish to graze and to feed on the algae then they start overgrowing the corals and we lose our coral cover. Eventually, once the live coral tissue is gone then the actual live tissue itself begins to fall apart because you don't have the live one there building new cement, building new reefs."
