Hi everyone! In our previous posts, we covered aquatic pollution in canals; in this post, we’ll be shifting gear into another water body susceptible to aquatic pollution: coastal water bodies, which includes bays and beaches. We’ll be exploring this through the case of Phi Phi Island in Southern Thailand – a tourist site that managed to stay relatively unscathed through the COVID crisis due to it having been closed off much earlier (we’ll see why in a while).
‘The Beach”
Maya Bay in full swing (Getty, n.d.)
Maya Bay in Phi Phi Island first shot to fame as the stunning paradise-like backdrop in The Beach, a movie released in 2000 that starred Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie made Maya Bay the face of Phi Phi Island (and in some ways, the idyllic offshore southern islands of Thailand as well), and tourists began to flock to the beach to see its beauty for themselves.
Yet, in 2018, Maya Bay became the victim of its own success, in which the authorities, realising that the number of tourists visiting the beach was overwhelming the area’s ecosystem, decided to close off the beach indefinitely in order to allow nature to heal.
What happened?
In a highly informative article packed with visual aids, the BBC concisely summarised that the beach had become overwhelmed not only by tourists but also their tourist boats that dropped anchor in the bay, leaked their engine oils, and scared marine life away. As such, while the ecosystem in the bay was clearly being damaged physically through treading and trampling by tourists, the more insidious and more toxic threat of the boats that seemed to be, at most, accomplices in transporting tourists to and fro from the island were now being recognised as perpetrators too.
The ecosystem doesn’t need oiling
Tourist boats affect the coastal environment in two broad ways – firstly, through their physical crushing of corals and scaring away of marine life; and secondly, through the engine oil that they leak. It is the latter that we turn our attention to in this blog post, whereby the toxic effects of such a substance are far less visible to the eye.
Oil, while being a natural substance, can become harmful to marine life when introduced into the environment in large, unnatural quantities that the ecosystem cannot process. In the context of tourism at Phi Phi Island, this ‘oil overload’ comes in the form of the tourists boats leaking oil into the bay, resulting in harmful effects wrought on both animals like fish as well as corals.
Marine creatures like fish can be negatively impacted by oil in several different ways – they can be smothered by the oil, be poisoned by the direct toxicity of the oil when ingested, and even experience chemotaxis failure, the impediment of their ability to engage in chemical communication with other organisms of their species (Farrington, 2014). In the case of corals, oil pollution can impede their metabolism as well as cause physiological damage to their mouth receptors (Reimer, 1975) – ultimately affecting the health of such creatures.
No, corals don’t need sunscreen
Engine oil is not the end of the story – after the initiation of the rehabilitation program, the study team leading the program found yet another (major) insidious cause of the death of coral reefs: the chemicals from the sunscreen used by tourists to protect themselves from the harmful UV rays of the sun.
This meant that tourists didn’t need to trample on corals to kill them – they simply had to sweat or accidentally drip a drop of sunscreen into the bay. Compounds like Oxybenzone, or BP-3, as well as Benzophenone-2, or BP-2, frequently used in sun protection products, have been found to be extremely harmful to corals, especially juvenile ones (NOAA, n.d.), in which these UV filtration compounds increase the corals’ susceptibility to coral bleaching, DNA damage, and abnormal skeletal growth.
Consider the insidious and invisible
All of these impacts on marine life are invisible to the naked eye; it is no wonder that it was only after a while that the Thai government decided that it had to learn how to balance the needs of the tourists as well as the ecosystem.
Should you attempt to reduce your environmental footprint on your next holiday when travel is allowed once more, don’t forget to consider less visible threats you may pose to the environment too!
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References
BBC n.d., ‘The beach nobody can touch’, BBC, viewed 6 September 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_beach_nobody_can_touch
Ellis-Petersen, H 2018, ‘Thailand bay made famous by The Beach closed indefinitely’, The Guardian, viewed 6 September 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/03/thailand-bay-made-famous-by-the-beach-closed-indefinitely
Getty n.d., Maya Bay, online image, viewed 6 September 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/asia/thailand/articles/maya-beach-reopening-2020-thailand/
Farrington, J.W. 2014, ‘Oil pollution in the marine environment II: fates and effects of oil spills’, Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, vol. 56, no. 4, pp. 16-31, doi: https://doi-org.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/10.1080/00139157.2014.922382
NOAA n.d., ‘Skincare Chemicals and Coral Reefs’, National Ocean Service, viewed 6 September 2020, https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/news/sunscreen-corals.html#:~:text=In%20a%202016%20study%2C%20a,against%20the%20sun’s%20harmful%20effects.
Post Reporters 2018, ‘Maya Bay’s coral 50% destroyed’, Bangkok Post, viewed 6 September 2020, https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1553730/maya-bays-coral-50-destroyed
Reimer, A.A. 1975, ‘Effect of crude oil on corals’, Marine pollution bulletin, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 39-43, doi: https://doi-org.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/10.1016/0025-326X(75)90297-0