Cabo Pulmo EcoAdventures

In the early 1990s, local fishers in this tiny village noticed their 20,000-year-old coral reef was dying. The Castro family, who’d lived there for a century, did something radical: they convinced their neighbors to give up fishing entirely. By 1995, the community successfully lobbied to turn their waters into a no-take marine reserve. Fourteen years later, fish biomass had exploded by 463 percent, the largest increase ever measured in any marine reserve worldwide. Former fishers now run dive shops, like this one, and the reef has become what scientists call one of the most robust marine reserves on Earth.