GEORGE TOWN, Dec 26 ― An estimated RM24 million worth of fish at the Sungai Udang aquaculture farms died a month after a tsunami devastated Penang in 2004, but the state's marine life and seafood supply faces a far bigger threat today at the hands of humans.

According to marine biologist Dr Aileen Tan, “man-made disasters” such as land reclamation, pollution and climate change were a greater and more lasting menace to the state's fragile marine ecosystem compared to what Mother Nature threw its way 10 years ago on Boxing Day.

“With natural disasters, like the tsunami, it comes, it destroys some and it improves some, and slowly, the marine life either adapts to the changes or some of the changes returned to normal,” the associate professor at Universiti Sains Malaysia told Malay Mail Online in a recent interview.

The 2004 Boxing tsunami led to the destruction of certain marine species and their habitats but also had a positive effect on some coastal areas, she said, pointing to the introduction of several new seagrass species around the Penang's artificial Mazumbo Island.

“We can see that immediately after 2004, the species and population of seagrass in the Mazumbo Island, located near the Penang Bridge, had quadrupled and this is good because sea grass banks are a nursery or breeding grounds for marine life,” she said.

Prawns are now dying off due to the high acidic levels of the sea, December 26, 2014.

However, unlike the effects of the tsunami, the effects of land reclamation, pollution and development lead to a decline in the marine population of fishes in the wild, crustacea and other shellfish, she said.

“The number of wild caught seafood is reducing greatly due to many factors such as overfishing and the increase in acidity in the ocean,” Tan said.

Climate change and pollution has increased the acidity of the seawater and this has consequently thinned out the shell of crustacea such as crabs, prawns and lobster, effectively reducing their population.

“The crustacea are dying out and fishermen are finding it harder to catch these in the sea so we will be getting fewer wild-caught prawns and crabs in years to come,” Tan said.

But wild fish and crustacea are not the only ones affected; the marine biologist added that even farmed seafood, which are essentially bred in aquaculture ponds boxed off from the open sea are in danger.

One of the short-term measures to overcome this problem is to learn from the effects of the tsunami where the fittest of the marine life survived, Tan said.

“We need to pick the survivors and breed from these in the aquaculture farms to produce stronger species that do not die out easily,” she said.

There are now less fishes and crustaceans in the sea due to climate change and developments, December 26, 2014.

Naturally, she said, the longer-term solution is the bigger, worldwide issue of reducing pollution to stop climate change and finding ways to reduce the impact of land reclamation.

Land reclamation is one of the rapid developments being undertaken on land-strapped Penang island and it had only worsened the marine ecosystem by destroying the most fertile parts of the coastal areas, especially along less polluted seafronts.

“I am not against development as I understand that these reclamation projects are needed to draw in more investments and money for the state and its economy but these developments are also at the cost of our delicate marine ecosystem that can’t be merely ‘relocated’,” Tan said.

The university don said land reclamation should only be done in areas where it has less effect on the environment, such as at highly polluted areas where no marine life existed.