Marine reserve benefits unfold

and ill. But it was an " absenteeism that would see him through the next stormy decade, " wrote Desmond and Moore as the publication of the Origin of Species caused a storm. While the meeting went on, Darwin and his wife, Emma, were burying their son, Charles, in the parish churchyard. And Darwin was relieved at the silence following the Linnean Society paper and sped ahead with his work. He felt the need to produce a fuller statement of his theory after the Linnean Society meeting, but by October his manuscript was turning into a book. Darwin was still anxious also about how Wallace would respond to how events had unfurled. He got his response in January 1859. Wallace was not only gracious but gratified to have galvanised Darwin into action. Darwin replied that he " had absolutely nothing whatever to do in leading Lyell and Hooker to what they thought was a fair course of action ". Through his life, Wallace was an active public defender of the theory of natural selection. Late in life, he reverted to a philosophy that added an element of final cause through intelligent design. While he was collecting natural history specimens in the Malay Archipelago, he discovered a faunal boundary, later termed 'The Wallace Line', now recognised as the result of plate tectonics. The benefits of creating marine reserves are still being discovered as they are so few, worldwide, and mostly relatively recent in origin. So the news that the world's largest reserve, around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, is having unexpected effects on the reef is welcome. On page R598-R599 of this issue, Hugh Sweatman at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, reports that the marine reserve appears to be reducing numbers of one of the most damaging predators of corals: the crown-of-thorns starfish. The starfish undergoes population explosions that create immense damage on coral reefs. Three major outbreaks have affected the Great Barrier Reef since the 1960s, Sweatman says. But the relative frequency of outbreaks is almost four times less in the protected area of the reef, compared with regions nearby where fishing occurred. The first protected areas within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park were established in 1989, and comprised 4.5 per cent of the park area, so represented just a small part of the reef facing pressures from outside. " New starfish infestations arise through …