Paper short abstract:

Coral reefs are symbiotic assemblages whose study has expanded community ecology. Drawing on ethnography with reef-dependent peoples in Indonesia and conservation science, I examine the evolution of marine protected areas, and the ways in which they have grappled with conservation beyond species.

Paper long abstract:

Perhaps because of the overt physics of the milieu, and perhaps because large-scale changes in biological science towards ecology and then systems biology have developed simultaneously with increased ocean exploration, marine biology has a long engagement with research beyond speciation. One of the most emblematic examples of this reframe is coral reef ecology. From their base form reefs have challenged categorization: corals themselves are faunal-floral-mineral symbiotic assemblages that build living landscapes that host complex communities. They cover less than one percent of the global ocean, but play a role in roughly a quarter of life there (NOAA 2021). Through this role, they also nourish the millions of humans who have ocean-dependent livelihoods. At the same time that reefs were pushing science towards better understandings of community, mutualism, and phylogeny, many were dying. In part because of their intensively inter-specied life histories corals are specifically vulnerable to ocean temperature and chemistry changes caused by global warming and other anthropogenic environmental stressors (Hughes et al 2018, Sully et al 2019). Marine conservation bodies have struggled to adapt both to these messy, relational life histories and to their co-evolving threats. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with reef-dependent communities in eastern Indonesia and ten years of engagement with marine conservation research, in this paper I examine the evolution of marine protected areas in the Coral Triangle of Southeast Asia, and analyzes some of the ways in which conservation practice there has been variously able and unable to tackle management and conservation beyond species.