The Rising Environmental Toll of China's Offshore Island Grab

Oct 10, 2016 | Mike Ives
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In the late 1980s, marine biologist John McManus and his colleagues made a surprising discovery while studying near-shore Philippine reefs in the South China Sea: Some fish species seemed to disappear, only to reappear a year or two later. “We figured they weren’t coming from other parts of the coast because the entire South China Sea, with the exception of Brunei, is equally overfished,” says McManus, a professor of marine biology and fisheries at the University of Miami.

The researchers’ hunch, which proved to be correct, was that larvae were floating to the near-shore reefs from the Spratlys — an offshore archipelago that lies between Vietnam and the Philippines and is a key spawning ground for one of the world’s most productive fisheries. Scientists later reported that the South China Sea, which is the size of India and has hundreds of islands and islets, has some of the highest marine biodiversity on earth, with 571 known species of reef corals alone.