- Charles Darwin described the Belize Barrier Reef, a complex system of coral reefs, atolls and cayes spanning 300 kilometers (186 miles) and cradling the nation’s coast, as “the most remarkable reef in the West Indies.”
- Today, unprecedented coral bleaching, a relatively new illness called stony coral tissue loss disease and other threats to corals are negatively impacting reef health across Belize, according to local organizations and a recent reef health assessment.
- The government is looking to identify 20% of the reef for full protection, part of an effort to roughly triple coral reef protection from 7% to 20%.
- Meanwhile nonprofit and scientific groups are doubling down on restoration and monitoring efforts.
PLACENCIA, Belize — After Hurricane Iris decimated the coral reef at Laughing Bird Caye National Park in 2001, many wrote off the UNESCO World Heritage site as a coral graveyard. But a small group from the coastal village of Placencia, Belize, about 18 kilometers (11 miles) from the island, saw hope. In 2006, the park had just 6% live coral cover. By 2023, it had reached approximately 60% — the result of the group planting more than 92,000 fragments of coral within the 1-hectare (2.5-acre) shallow fringing reef.
The group, Fragments of Hope (FOH), is a Belize-based nonprofit organization focused on restoring coral reef habitats. Their work at Laughing Bird Caye is widely regarded as the best example of reef restoration in the Caribbean. But while the park stands as a beacon of hope for coral restoration, it has not been immune to the onslaught of record-breaking temperatures occurring globally.
“2024 was the worst bleaching event since we’ve been recording around 2008,” Lisa Carne, FOH’s founder, said during an interview with Mongabay. Many of the corals planted at Laughing Bird have succumbed to extreme heat stress and disease. At Moho Caye, another restoration site, live coral cover dropped from more than 50% to less than 5%, “likely reflecting similar declines at Laughing Bird,” Carne said.
It’s not just Laughing Bird and Moho. Unprecedented coral bleaching, a relatively new illness called stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD), and other threats to corals are negatively impacting reef health across Belize, and it forced FOH to shift tactics.
“Over the past two years, it’s been getting hotter and hotter, and we haven’t been able to plant coral, which is what we would normally do,” Monique Vernon, a coral reef restoration practitioner trained by FOH who has been conducting restoration and monitoring activities with the group for years, told Mongabay.
Instead, the group focused on conducting monitoring surveys and collecting data on the rate of coral bleaching and coral diseases at restored sites in Belize.
“We’re trying to host two trainings per year so that we can get more Belizeans on board helping us to survey corals,” Vernon said. In March, when Mongabay spoke with her, Vernon was doing just that: serving as a trainer for a FOH workshop in Placencia to teach a group of Belizeans the basics of coral monitoring and data collection.
This scientific effort is pivotal to identifying site variability and corals that show genetic resistance to stressors, according to Carne. She called these resilient corals “winners” and said finding them will inform future coral restoration and protection activities. FOH will eventually transplant fragments from these winners to sites with fewer stressors, with the hope that their proven resilience in harsher conditions will increase their chances of survival and growth.
“We need to keep an eye on everything with monitoring,” Esther Peters, an expert on coral reefs and their diseases at George Mason University in Virginia, U.S., told Mongabay. “Often, there are not too many laboratories and not too many researchers. We need to bring in more people and get them involved and being able to report what they see to researchers,” said Peters, who has conducted research in Belize over the years and has recently been working close by, in Roatan, Honduras.
‘The most remarkable reef’
Laughing Bird Caye is part of the Belize Barrier Reef, a complex system of coral reefs, atolls, and cayes, or small islands, spanning 300 kilometers (186 miles) and cradling the nation’s coast. It is the core region of the nearly 1,125-kilometer (700-mile) Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, which extends from Yucatán, Mexico, to the Bay Islands of Honduras and is the largest reef in the western hemisphere.
Charles Darwin described the Belize Barrier Reef as “the most remarkable reef in the West Indies.” It acts as a nursery for the important commercial fish species that are vital to Belize’s economy and provides habitat for various threatened marine species like the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus), the American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus), and green (Chelonia mydas), hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata) and loggerhead (Caretta caretta) turtles.
According to WWF, a U.S.-based NGO that operates in Belize, the value of the services the reef provides to the nation’s economy in areas like commercial fisheries, tourism and storm surge protection is worth up to $559 million per year. That’s significant for a country with a GDP of around $3 billion.
Belize’s reefs in peril
Since 2023, Belize’s reefs, like reefs around the world, have been experiencing extreme temperatures linked to the fourth global coral bleaching event, which continues to the present.
“Our reefs are in peril,” Beverly Wade, CEO of the government’s Ministry of Blue Economy and Marine Conservation, told Belizean media during an interview in April.
The 2024 Mesoamerican Reef Report Card, released in October, quantified the threats and outlined the reef’s health status. The report card rates the overall health of Belize’s reef as poor, with a Reef Health Index (RHI) average score of 2.5 out of 5 based on surveys at 110 sites. Among the six reef complexes assessed in Belize, four were ranked fair with RHIs ranging from 2.8 to 3.3, and two were considered poor with RHIs at 2.3. One bright spot was an increase in the biomass of both commercial and herbivorous fish since the 2022 report card. But the country’s overall live coral cover declined from 18% to 15% over the same period.
Raphael Martinez, Belize coordinator for Healthy Reefs for Healthy People, the international partnership program that coordinates publication of the report card, told Mongabay the decline in overall coral cover was largely due to bleaching. Coral mortality continued even after surveys were concluded for the 2024 report card, he said.
Bleached corals are essentially starving. Heat stress disrupts the symbiosis between the coral animal and the photosynthetic zooxanthellae that live in its tissues, forcing the zooxanthellae to vacate, which leaves the coral a ghastly white and without a food source.
Coral can recover from bleaching if the heat stress decreases and zooxanthellae return, but these individuals are often vulnerable to disease for two to four years post-recovery, with their growth and reproduction impaired. Algae can quickly overgrow the dead coral.
But other factors beyond heat can also interfere with the life-giving symbiosis. “[I]f the coral becomes unhealthy due to responses to contaminants or changed salinities or anything else that may affect their physiology, that symbiosis is not going to work right,” Peters said.
The 2024 report card found that in Belize, high nutrient levels, particularly in the southern regions, and unacceptable concentrations of human sewage pathogens continue to impact the reef.
“Both government and private sector investments are needed to implement tertiary wastewater treatment within effective management systems,” Martinez said.
Diseases like white band, black band and the infectious SCTLD are also menacing Belize’s reefs. SCTLD, a new disease characterized by multiple lesions or dead spots on infected corals, has spread rampantly in Belize since 2019, killing off corals at a record pace. SCTLD had not been identified in southern Belize at the time the 2024 report card was published. By May 2025, it was detected at Laughing Bird for the first time.
Monitoring for the future
In light of the difficulties facing Belize’s reefs, getting more young Belizeans involved in learning about corals and monitoring methods is essential, according to FOH. Ali Cansino, a FOH site coordinator and trainer, said trainees become the group’s eyes and ears on the water.
Nicole Leslie, a Placencia resident and tour guide who participated in the March training, told Mongabay she plans to continue participating in coral survey work.
“I learned so much about the corals, about the different types of diseases, the AGGRA codes and much more,” she said, referring to standardized codes used in the Atlantic and Gulf Rapid Reef Assessment (AGGRA) program. This international collaboration categorizes and identifies different components of coral reef ecosystems and facilitates data collection and analysis to track reef health and changes over time.
“Every day, I go out and I see the difference in the coral and in how short a period of time everything changes,” Leslie said.
“Monitoring and data collection are important to guide management and policy, keep communities engaged, evaluate the effectiveness of our MPAs and support funding and research,” Martinez said.
During the April interview, marine ministry CEO Wade said the Belize government is looking to identify 20% of the reef for full protection, part of its commitment under the Belize Blue Bond to roughly triple coral reef protection from 7% to 20%.
The Belize Blue Bond is a landmark debt swap agreement, inked in 2021, that unlocks more than $160 million for marine conservation. The country also pledged to protect 30% of its ocean under the agreement. Identifying reef sites that are resilient to environmental stressors and placing them under full protection is among the goals.
“We have bright spots. There are some areas that we are seeing rebounding. We’re hoping it’s so, but I think what is more important is that we’re not just sitting back and just saying the reef is dying and we’re not doing anything,” Wade said.
The Ministry declined to respond to Mongabay’s questions about the health of the country’s coral and requests for coral health data for this story.
In June, Fragments of Hope made the critical decision to lift its self-imposed moratorium on planting coral. This comes in response to the World Meteorological Organization’s stark warning that heat stress on the world’s oceans is not expected to ease over the next five years. Waiting out the heat would cost precious time — and the chance to secure the reef’s future.
Banner image: Corals and fish in Lighthouse Reef atoll, Belize. Image © Greg Asner.
Researchers race to understand disease killing Caribbean corals at unprecedented rates
Citation:
McField, M.D. (2000). Influence of disturbance on coral reef community structure in Belize. Proceedings of the Ninth International Coral Reef Symposium, Bali 1, 63–68. Retrieved from: www.academia.edu/67421058/The_Influence_of_Disturbance_and_Management_on_Coral_Reef_Community_Structure_in_Belize
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