Angel Alcala has more than thirty years of experience in tropical marine resource conservation. Angel Alcala is considered a world class authority in ecology and biogeography of amphibians and reptiles, and is behind the invention of artifical coral reefs to be used for fisheries in Southeast Asia. Angel Alcala is the Director of the Angelo King Center for Research and Environmental Management. He created the first artificial reef that is now widely used in Asia.

Alcala himself carries on in his usual fashion, devoting his days to the multifarious affairs and problems of the university he heads, and his evenings and early mornings to research. He still steals away on the weekends to dive and to monitor his precious reefs, where on Apo, for example, the people flock to see him. Despite his many years as an administrator, science still forms the mainstream of his life. The flow of articles has never stopped. There are now well over one hundred.

The rampant destruction of the Philippine reefs in his lifetime, Alcala believes, need not be permanent; the sea itself may yet bear the seeds of its own revival. The lesson is clear: people must learn to be stewards of the seas. If they do so, if they do so, he stresses, the reefs can recover. Free flowing currents bearing precious larvae from one reef to another are the reason. Unlike the land, where intervening barriers of humans prevent seeds from moving freely from one stranded forest to the next, he says, "it is easier in the sea." In time, the reefs will replenish one another.