PULAU PAYAR MARINE PARK Located at just 35km south of Langkawi is the little piece of heaven for tourist, divers and marine life. Georgeous coral gardens that is home to a vast diversity of magnificent corals and tropical fishes gives divers and snorkellers an opportunity to discover the incredible creation of the ocean Come, explore, snorkle and dive away in the ocean with abundant of sea wonders waiting to be discovered. The thriving marine life and vegetation here makes for an exciting snorkelling and diving experience. Visitors can also choose to feed baby sharks or take a swim by the beach.
Coral reefs conservation has been the subject of global interest since 1980s (McManus, 1988; McClanahan & Muthiga, 1988; Sadovy 1989, 1997; Roberts & Polunin, 1993). With the declining trend in the fish stock of major world fisheries due to overexploitation and deterioration of coastal habitats, many countries have opted for other management strategies to support existing conventional management measures. As a result, more conservation efforts were implemented to replenish fish population and to rehabilitate coastal habitats.
In Malaysia, several marine protected areas (MPA) in the form of marine parks and fisheries protected areas have been created since 1983 (Hiew 1998, Najib et al, 2002). At the beginning, besides creating the marine parks, more conservation efforts were concentrated on the rehabilitation of coral reef ecosystem, through the construction of artificial reef through out the country. Research on the artificial reef were confined to construction aspects such as better design, suitable material and finding suitable sites for the reef to be launched.
The construction of the artificial reefs was then slowed down in the 1990's. Beside discouraging outcomes like coral encrustation, more studies found that the reef acts just like other fish aggregating devices (FAD) that aggregates surrounding fishes rather than generating new fish biomass. It seems that the natural coral reef ecosystems cannot be replaced by the artificial one, and protecting the natural coral reef ecosystems through the creation and establishment of marine parks as a conservation measure was opted.
Coral reef fish are also sampled using various fishing gears, such as hook-andlines, traps and drift nets (Ahmad et al., 1996; Ruhana, 1999). The hook-andlines is the most common method applied. The catch rate is the most popular index used to represent the fish abundance, and the unit of measurement frequently used is the number of fish caught per unit of effort.
Although many studies on the coral reefs fish population have been conducted prior to and after the establishment of the marine parks (DeSilva and Rahman, 1982; Ibrahim and Zaharuddin, 1988; Norhayati, 2000), several key issues remain unanswered. One of the key questions is on the effectiveness of the parks in enhancing the biomass of exploited species inside the parks. Diversity analysis based on the species list for example, only shows how diverse an ecosystem is, but does not show how productive the ecosystem is. Research on productivity using fishing gears fails to show changes in the fish biomass inside
marine parks.
While the benefits of marine parks in protecting and enhancing the abundance of exploited species inside and outside of the parks are well documented elsewhere (Roberts & Polunin, 1991; DeMartini, 1993; Sladek & Roberts, 1997), these outcomes are yet to be shown here. The key answer to these questions can be obtained through quantitative assessment of the coral reef fishes. As far as Malaysia is concerned, there is no quantitative assessment of the coral reef fishes. Through the quantitative assessment, the biomass of the reef fishes can be estimated. Just like in the demersal fish stock assessment where the biomass is estimated through demersal resource surveys, the reef’s fish biomass can then be monitored over time. As such, any positive or negative effect of creating the marine parks can be ascertained.
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