A petition is underway to help protect some very rare, very ancient sponge reefs off B.C.'s coast including several in the Strait of Georgia near the Sunshine Coast.
The Sunshine Coast Conservation Association (SCCA) and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society have partnered to petition the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to ban fishing around the glass sponge reefs and set up buffer areas around them. Glass sponge reefs, originally thought to have gone extinct about 30 million years ago, only appear in a few locations in the world, all near B.C's coastline. The reefs are threatened by fishing, especially bottom trawling.
"It's a very rare species of sponge and it's nice to know that these things exist. They provide nesting areas and habitat for snappers and fish to grow in," said David Moul, the SCCA member spearheading the local petition. "It's something that we should be excited about. No other place in the world has these things. I think they're worth preserving."
The reefs were first discovered in Hecate Strait on B.C.'s North Coast in 1987. Since then, several smaller reefs have been found off Sechelt and Gibsons, West Vancouver and Vancouver Island.
Moul said he hopes to take the petition to the Coast's local governments in September to help drum up support.
SCCA executive director Dan Bouman said SCCA members are circulating copies of the petition, but the group plans to really ramp up efforts at the end of August. He said while there is not a lot of fishing that goes on near the reefs now, they are simply too rare, fragile and important to local ecosystems to not protect.
"We don't think that it's going to compromise any great deal of economic hardship here but there is a possibility that people might trawl through these things and do irreparable damage," he said. "It's not protected in any way at the moment. The long term thing is to get the federal government to protect it."
