More emphasis should be placed on the preservation of coral reefs off the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島), Minister of the Interior Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) said on Wednesday.
Hsu made the remark after witnessing the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the Marine National Park Headquarters and National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung.
The agreement aims to promote scientific research at the Dongsha Atoll Research Station, he said.
Photo courtesy of National Sun Yat-sen University
“We hope that the research will help Taiwan increase its knowledge of the sea and promote maritime culture, instead of simply promoting seafood culture,” Hsu said.
The coral reef near the islands is 200 to 4,000 years old, said station project director Keryea Soong (宋克義), who is also a professor at the university’s Department of Oceanography.
An adjacent seagrass bed is at least 80km2, more than 300 times the size of Taipei’s Daan Forest Park (大安森林公園), he said.
Photo: Huang Hsu-lei, Taipei Times
With the support of the Ministry of Science and Technology, the station has published about 50 scientific papers on the coral reef over the past five years, Soong said.
It is also the only sea zone in the nation where whiptail stingrays and sharks can be seen, he said, adding that the area is also home to Coenobita rugosus, a type of land hermit crab.
Coral whitening can be observed from civilian airliners flying overhead, he added.
While the coral reef is not currently open to the public, Hsu pledged to promote ecotourism to the atoll and to increase the use of green energy on the island that houses the station.
That would be a great opportunity for Taiwan to give to the world, as the South China Sea is the “sentinel post” for seawater acidification, station researchers said.
Due to the rising acidification of seawater, the station might see an increase in visiting researchers, they said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater