Palau’s waters are some of the most biodiverse in the world—thanks to its defenders

On a clear morning in December 2020, at the southwestern edge of the Palau archipelago, rangers from the Helen Reef Resource Management Program were starting their day, tidying up around their station and checking spearguns for afternoon fishing, when they heard a motor and soon spotted an unknown vessel. This could only mean trouble. They would have been notified about a legitimate craft coming to Hotsarihie, as Helen Reef is known to the Hatohobei people, the traditional stewards of the area.

“That boat was coming in with a lot of goods,” recalled Petra Tkel, a conservation officer—or ranger, as the program staff call themselves—whose mother comes from Hatohobei, an island 40 miles west of the reef. It was part of a small fleet of six motorboats from a Chinese vessel poaching sea cucumbers that could fetch up to $800 a pound in Hong Kong.

When one boat approached the rangers’ station on Helen Island, a sandbar at the northern edge of the reef, the team communicated through hand gestures for the illegal fishermen to return to their ship and wait for further instruction. “I was scared,” Tkel said. “That was my first time encountering poachers.” She slipped away and made a call by satellite phone to the program manager in Koror, Palau’s largest city. Help was on the way, but it would take a couple of days to dispatch a Marine Law Enforcement boat across the 350 miles of open ocean. The rangers—who are not permitted to board foreign vessels for their own safety—would have to stall the poachers.

The fishermen later came back with rice, beer, and $20,000 cash, plus the promise of wiring an additional $30,000. Split evenly among the team, the total bribe amounted to a ranger’s annual salary. The poachers had assumed their money would work. But for Hercules Emilio, the team’s senior conservation officer, rejecting the money was a no-brainer. “We understand at the end of the day, we’re doing it for our people, for the future generation,” said Emilio, who grew up on Hatohobei, also called Tobi Island, when he was young.

The Chinese poachers brought their main vessel through the channel into the sheltered waters of the reef’s lagoon and sent divers down to plunder. They kept offering the money and goods, but the rangers remained steadfast.

Finally, with air and sea support from the U.S. Coast Guard, the patrol boat arrived from Koror on the third day and blocked the channel, trapping the Chinese vessel inside the lagoon. Officers boarded the ship and detained its crew of 28, seizing cash, motorboats, fishing gear, and 500 pounds of illegally harvested sea cucumbers.

(Palau burned boats to deter illegal fishing.)

“I am so proud of our rangers,” said Rosania Victor, the program’s manager, in a video about the incident. “For the sacrifices they made in manning the remote station away from their families. For their bravery in intercepting an illegal fishing vessel using their experience and tactics from their trainings. And for having the integrity to refuse the bribes.”

Since the Helen Reef Resource Management Program launched more than 20 years ago, traditional Hatohobei stewardship has guided its safeguarding of the reef. This is a testament to conservation efforts across Palau, one of the most protected and biodiverse places in the world’s oceans.

Hotsarihie means “reef of giant clams,” named for the once abundant Tridacna mollusks that, according to oral history, grew big enough for a diver to comfortably nestle inside. The atoll’s lagoon, channel, and extensive reef flats host a remarkable number of hard and soft coral species that provide underwater habitat for sea snails, sea cucumbers, and large reef fish, such as the humphead wrasse. On the island, green turtles and thousands of seabirds build nesting sites.

(Criminals are stealing giant clams—and carving them like ivory. Here's why.)

The intimate relationship the Hatohobei people have with the land and sea has nurtured an enduring body of knowledge, practices, and traditions known as moumou. These include agricultural methods, fishing techniques, and seafaring traditions that guided the original Hatohobei navigators from the distant outer islands of Yap. Hatohobei means “to make stronger magic and find,” a reminder of how the ancestors settled on the island of Hatohobei after voyaging some 800 miles by sea.

Early generations of Hatohobeians raised a massive taro patch in the middle of the island to ensure a reliable food source, which they use to this day. They developed an array of fishing methods, including dipnet fishing by torchlight, noosing sharks, fishing under drifting logs, kite fishing, and trolling. Though many of these techniques are no longer used, knowledge of them has endured in the Hatohobei community through two centuries of frequent upheaval.

Starting at the end of the 1800s, Palau’s more than 340 islands, islets, and atolls were claimed, exploited, and ruled, in succession, by Spain, Germany, Japan, and, following World War II, the United States. Palau gained independence in 1994 after several decades of negotiations with the U.S. Under an agreement between the two countries, Palau receives economic assistance and access to U.S. federal mail, weather, and aviation services, and its citizens can live, work, and study in the U.S. without a visa. In exchange, the U.S. maintains military defense authority.

Over the years, foreign occupations, epidemics, storms and erosion, and extraction of natural resources have forced most of the Hatohobeians to leave their home island for Koror and beyond. Of the approximately 200 people of Hatohobei ancestry in Palau, only about 30 still live on the island year-round. Most reside in the community of Echang, established during the German occupation in the early 1900s in faraway Koror state. Today Hatohobei and Hotsarihie remain social and cultural bedrocks for the community that continues to care for them.

In the 1990s, fishing boats from Indonesia and the Philippines greedily raided the reef using dynamite, cyanide, and large nets to harvest sea cucumbers, sea snails, giant clams, sharks, groupers, and turtles.

With the help of two American scientists, the community reached out to other Pacific islanders to learn how they handled overfishing. But first it had to answer one question: Who owns the reef? This prompted a series of public meetings in 1999, attended by members of all Hatohobei families. After reviewing and acknowledging family and clan oral histories, the community agreed that the reef was collectively owned by the Hatohobei people. “The elder in the room asked each of the heads of family, ‘What is your say?’ And they all voiced their yes,” explained Wayne Andrew, a Hatohobeian and senior director of the Micronesia program at the conservation nonprofit OneReef. “We want Helen Reef to be protected.”

The approach is different from landownership on Hatohobei, which is clan based, passed on matrilineally, and often contested. Such an innovative declaration of collective ownership disentangled the future of the reef from disputes and made it possible to manage for the benefit of all Hatohobeians. “Community is not people alone,” said Andrew. “Community is a place, the reef. The respect of all of that is so important.”

In 2000 a group of Hatohobeians, other Palauans, and international groups secured government and private funding to start the Helen Reef Resource Management Program, and the following year the Hatohobei state legislature passed a law establishing the reef as a protected area. For the first four years, it was closed to marine-life harvest. As the reef recovered, approximately 30 percent of the atoll was opened up for sustainable fishing. “When we have abundance then the spillover can supply the community,” explained Thomas Patris, a former governor of Hatohobei state who was instrumental in the creation of the reserve.

(Palau created one of the largest marine reserves on the planet—and it's paying off.)

Eventually, the program built a permanent ranger station, trained and hired Hatohobeians and other Palauans as conservation officers, and developed a comprehensive management plan based on scientific research and traditional knowledge. The rangers not only deter illegal fishing but also monitor turtles and other wildlife to maintain the restoration and health of the atoll.

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Patris remembered visiting the reef as a small child: “In the evening, when it’s low tide, the birds come in from hunting and would fly so low that the giant clams get excited and close their shells, squirting water out.” Years later he took his kids to witness the phenomenon to no avail. But now “the resources are coming back,” he said. “And we want to keep it that way.”

Traditional stewardship is about applying the knowledge that generations of Hatohobeian ancestors gained while making the most of their limited resources. “They knew the right seasons for fishing,” Andrew explained. “When there was a good season, they would sail out and fish for pelagic fish, like mahi-mahi, tuna, flying fish, and needlefish. When there was a bad season, with rough seas, they would fish close to the reef, rotating through different species important for their livelihoods.”

(Indigenous peoples defend Earth's biodiversity—but they're in danger.)

The people of Hatohobei “use their traditional ecological knowledge in a supremely thoughtful way,” agreed Stuart Sandin, a marine biologist at the University of California, San Diego. He has led several expeditions to Hotsarihie as part of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s research initiative on reef health across the tropical Pacific. Sandin pointed to the area’s robust populations of bumphead parrotfish and giant groupers, “fish that you just don’t see in heavily exploited systems.” Coral regrowth is also remarkable, according to Sandin. A series of images taken over time by his team show the reef’s corals have grown back “like crazy” after a considerable disturbance, such as a big wave or a coral-bleaching event. It’s “another signature that’s consistent with well-managed systems,” he said.

Initially financed mostly by outside sources, the Helen Reef Resource Management Program is now supported largely by Palau’s Protected Areas Network Fund. The independent nonprofit organization serves as a financial trustee for money generated from “green fees” charged by the government to anyone who visits the country. This allows for the employment of eight full-time rangers rotating in and out of Hotsarihie every three to six months.

Palau’s conservation measures expanded with the creation of its national marine sanctuary, which went into effect in 2020. One of the largest marine protected areas in the world, the refuge protects 80 percent of Palau’s waters and more than 184,000 square miles of the western Pacific from extractive activities, including mining and fishing. The country has some of the highest levels of marine biodiversity in all of Micronesia, with hundreds of species of hard corals, soft corals, and sponges; over 1,300 species of reef fish; and significant stocks of tuna, billfish, sharks, and rays. The fund and sanctuary share an ethos rooted in Palau’s traditional practice of bul: restricting fishing in certain reef areas and certain times of year to allow for regeneration.

(Inside the ambitious push to protect a third of the world’s ocean.)

Now, with the help of U.S.-based environmental organizations, Palau’s current president has begun looking at ways to modify the sanctuary’s boundaries to allow for increased revenue from commercial fishing—a response, in part, to an economic decline brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no doubt, explained Andrew, that a boost in commercial fishing in Palau would affect marine biodiversity. But any changes to the national sanctuary’s boundaries won’t take away Hotsarihie’s protected-area status, and Andrew affirms that the people of Hatohobei will continue to look after it.

A few years after the incident with the Chinese poachers, rangers still occupy their remote sandbar station. They haven’t faced another international skirmish yet, but they’re ready for whatever may come over the horizon.

“What I love about the job is that I’m helping the community,” said ranger Tkel. “Even when there’s another job opportunity for me, I’ll stick with my island.”

(Palau was the first country to require 'eco-pledge' upon arrival.)