Saudi Arabia's Farasan Islands Hareed Festival Reveals the Limits of Science and the Depth of Traditional Marine Knowledge

Every year since before living memory, hundreds of people on the Farasan Islands in the Red Sea wade into the water to catch longnose parrotfish, known locally as hareed, which gather at Al-Hasis Beach in a dense aggregation that follows the full moon with extraordinary precision. For Laila Shaaban, a Saudi marine biology PhD student at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology who attended the festival, the event poses one of the Red Sea's most compelling unanswered questions: why do these fish keep coming, and what does the continued existence of this spectacle tell us about what we risk losing as coral reefs decline globally?

 

The Scientific Mystery at the Heart of the Festival

 

The hareed aggregation at Farasan defies straightforward scientific explanation. Many islanders believe the fish travel from as far as India or Pakistan to reach the festival site, a journey that would require migrations of more than 4,500 kilometres through shallow coastal waters. Marine ecologist Renato Morais has noted that no parrotfish species is known to undertake migrations anywhere close to that scale, and dissection of ten festival fish showed no signs of migration stress. The leading scientific hypothesis is that the aggregation is spawning-related, supported by observations of ripe ovaries in female fish, yet Al-Hasis Beach lacks the characteristics typically associated with reef fish spawning sites. It is shallow, sheltered, remote from the reef edge, and experiences limited water movement. What science has confirmed is that the gathering coincides precisely with coral spawning, and that the briny scent islanders associate with the arrival of the hareed is actually the smell of coral spawn rising to the surface, a connection that many Farasanis had identified through observation long before scientific verification.

 

Hyperstability, Population Risk, and the Limits of Catch Data

 

Shaaban's attendance at the festival activated the professional instincts of a scientist studying climate change and human impacts on the ocean, raising the question of how such intensive extraction is sustainable year after year. Morais has pointed to the concept of hyperstability, in which dense and predictable fish aggregations can mask broader population declines because catch rates remain high even as overall abundance falls. Formal municipal governance of the festival began only 22 years ago, and the current practice of herding fish into holding cages over the first four days before releasing them for the public event may have obscured what the population looked like across earlier generations of the festival. Determining whether hyperstability is occurring would require independent population estimates around Farasan and across neighbouring regions, data that do not currently exist. The parallel with bumphead parrotfish in the Solomon Islands, where a similar phenomenon has already been documented, makes the concern concrete rather than speculative.

 

Read more: Fifteen Countries Sign Mombasa Declaration to Share Fisheries Data and Combat IUU Fishing

 

Traditional Knowledge and the Integrity of Cultural Memory

 

A recurring tension in Shaaban's account is the relationship between scientific confidence and the lived knowledge of Farasani fishermen, who describe the festival as a fixed and certain fact of life as reliable as the tides. The fishermen with whom she spoke during the festival demonstrated an intimate understanding of the ecosystem built across generations of daily interaction, including knowledge of the coral spawning connection that preceded formal scientific documentation. Shaaban has noted the professional instinct to override local knowledge and has reflected on the importance of checking that impulse, observing that scientists rarely know more than people whose lives are interwoven with an ecosystem every day. Ibrahim Muftah, a historian and leading expert on Farasani history, has described the urgency of preserving a record of a place that has sat at the crossroads of rulers, cultures, and trade routes in a geography genuinely unlike any other, and has expressed the concern that this preservation began too late. The festival draws increasing numbers of visitors each year and is growing into a tourist attraction, making the documentation and protection of its cultural and ecological significance more urgent.

 

Conservation Stakes and the Broader Coral Crisis

 

The hareed festival exists within a broader ecological context that gives it particular urgency. The boat operator Shaaban spoke with during the festival described raising his children in the water around the archipelago's islands while also speaking of the dimming of the reef and the loss of coral colour, a story repeated along coastlines globally. The 2018 IPCC report found that between 70 and 90 percent of warm-water coral reefs would disappear even if global warming is held to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and no communities will feel that loss more acutely than those whose livelihoods and cultural practices are inseparable from reef ecosystems. Whether the hareed will keep returning to Farasan depends in part on whether the coral system that may cue or sustain their aggregation survives, and in part on whether the aggregation itself is being managed sustainably. The answer to both questions requires exactly the integration of scientific assessment and traditional ecological knowledge that Shaaban argues is the only sufficient approach to understanding and protecting what is at stake.