Seventeen years ago, Cabo Pulmo's shallow reef was, like many in Mexico, degraded by commercial fishing boats, which often dragged their anchors or nets through the coral, to get at valuable species that lived there.
In 1995, with support from a local university, the government declared the reef a protected area and later upgraded it to marine park status.
The effort was aided by local residents, who largely transformed their economy from fishing to ecotourism, and the amount of life on the reef blossomed. A study by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California found that the biomass at the Cabo Pulmo reef - the total weight of living species - rose by 460 percent.
The reef is now so healthy that fish migrate from it to neighboring areas, helping fishermen there.
The Associated Press