The kaikoso (Anadara antiquate) a clam found in shallow mudflats and seagrass beds, is the clan totem of the people of Ucunivanua—the community’s symbolic animal. It is also a food staple and primary source of income, along with agricultural crops and other marine resources such as octopus. To preserve the kaikoso, residents of Ucunivanua began working in the 1990s with the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Suva, Fiji (Tawake et al. 2001). This collaboration began when the son of the high chief of Verata, the district in which Ucunivanua is located, studied land management at USP and asked his teachers there to help address some of the problems in his village.
At the end of two years of workshops and training in environmental education and community planning, the community decided to set up a 24-hectare tabu area on the mudflat and seagrass bed directly in front of the Ucunivanua village as an experiment. The hope was that as the clam population recovered in the tabu area, more clam larvae would settle in adjacent fishing areas as well, eventually leading to increased clam harvests in these areas—something called a seeding effect.
The village chose a group of 20 men and women to be on the tabu area management team. From the outset of the planning process, advisors from USP had requested that the team include equal numbers of adult men, women, and youth— an unusual step in traditional Fijian culture. The tabu area management team staked out the boundaries of the proposed protected area. The team then worked with the paramount chief and elders of the village to hold a traditional ceremony declaring the area tabu for three years.
Here is where modern technique fused with traditional village values. The scientific experts from USP taught team members the skills of monitoring and the basic ideas of sampling and statistics. The team learned how to lay line transects and to sample the clam population at 10-meter intervals along the 500-meter transect line, then record their results and analyze them with simple statistics. Using these skills, the team established a baseline of clam populations in the tabu area and in adjacent sites down current. Those baseline calculations were then o be used for comparison with the results of the annual monitoring to follow. In effect, the community learned how to conduct a scientific experiment to see if a locally managed marine area strategy would lead to increased resource yields and better conservation.
Monitoring data gathered by the team in 1997 and 2004 indicate the dimensions of the experiment’s success. The number of clams increased dramatically in both the tabu and adjacent harvest areas. (See “Figure 1: Trends in clam size and abundance, Ucunivanua, Fiji”.) At the start of the project, it was extremely rare to find a clam bigger than 5 cm in diameter. Today, the Ucunivanua community routinely finds clams in the tabu area that are over 8 cm in size. Because of its success, the Ucunivanua tabu area, which was initially intended to be closed to fishing and collection for just three years, has been extended indefinitely (Tawake and Aalbersberg 2003).
