Great Barrier Reef

I am seeking feedback, including comment and corrections, on this draft blog post. I have previously sent an email to Richard Vevers (1 October 2021) and placed a request for more information at the Catlin Survey website (20 April 2021), without receiving any response from either. Irus Braverman was kind enough to reply to my email (30 September 2021) indicating that the photograph used in her book Coral Whisperers was provided to her by Richard Vevers. 

If all science is either ‘physics’ or ‘stamp collecting’ as once suggested by Ernest Rutherford, I would argue that it is important that we not knowingly distribute fakes. 

Corals Healthy, Photograph Bleached – Draft 

Does it matter if the Internet is replete with fake photographs accompanying fake stories? Does it matter that these photographs keep children awake at night – worrying about climate change and the impending doom of our Great Barrier Reef? 

There is a photograph that has been promoted by Richard Vevers, the founder, and CEO of The Ocean Agency, a Washington-based international not-for-profit that is purportedly dedicated to marine conservation. It is described on his The Ocean Agency website as having been taken at Heron Island in 2015. On Flickr, the same photograph is described as having been taken in 2014, and in Irus Braverman’s book Coral Whisperers as having been taken in 2016. 

At least two of these photographs must be incorrectly labelled. 

It is the prestige associated with the XL Catlin Seaview Survey – touted as ‘the largest survey of the Great Barrier Reef ever undertaken’, ‘using unique SVII underwater camera systems’ and which commenced back in 2012 – that has given the photograph credibility.

The XL Catlin Seaview Survey was undertaken by The University of Queensland in partnership with Google, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the United Nation’s Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and others. The expedition visited Heron Island on 4 November 2012. The photographs from this survey can be viewed online, but this photograph is not among them. 

According to the survey’s website, the XL Catlin returned to the Great Barrier Reef in 2014 following cyclone Ita, and again in 2016 following a mass coral bleaching. However, none of the 226,000 georeferenced coral reef survey images are publicly available from these expeditions.  

According to a different survey, which was an aerial survey undertaken in 2016 by Terry Hughes from James Cook University, it was mostly the northern section of the Great Barrier Reef that bleached in that year; however, Heron Reef, which is part of the southern Great Barrier Reef, did not bleach at all at that time.  

In fact, the photograph was almost certainly taken on 22 October 2014, and it is not coral bleaching that is being seen. I hypothesise that the corals appear bleached because the photograph has been taken through layers of water that absorb light in the red spectrum and/or because some of the colour has been stripped from the photograph in post-production. Either way, it is not fit for purpose; it cannot credibly be presented as evidence of coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef in 2016.

Vever’s organisation has the official endorsement of the United Nation’s Ocean Decade, and the photograph may have been promoted by him ostensibly to support ocean science and conservation, and as evidence of bleaching at Heron Island in 2016. But this doesn’t make the image a true likeness. In fact, the photograph fits all the criteria of being a fake. I believe it does not show coral bleaching and there was no mass coral bleaching at Heron Island in 2016, or in 2015 or 2014.

I visited Heron Island earlier this month (November 2021) with underwater photographers Stuart Ireland and Leonard Lim. There we found the fringing reef to be healthy, including the fields of staghorn coral. We didn’t have the ‘unique SVII underwater camera systems’, nor the endorsement and sponsorship of a university, or Google, or the United Nations, but I did have the sense to place a colour chart among the corals to facilitate correct white colour balance in post-production.  

It is evident from our photographs, with the colour chart providing some quality assurance, that the fields of staghorn corals at Heron Island are not bleached – not this year anyway. Maybe next? 

Yet the XL Catlin Survey and Richard Vevers, via the Flickr website, continue to perpetuate the myth that they are bleached – most recently in the pages of the prestigious Smithsonian magazine.

Surely the children of the world deserve to know the truth about Heron Reef’s corals. 

*****

Tues. 30th November 2021

– A Note from Arthur Day

Dear Jen, 

Inspired by your request for help I offer the following:

Firstly, I used the uncorrected (white balance not corrected) native image you sent me the other day as one reference and adjusted the ‘fake image’ to match it.

That was EASY and did not require anything more of an adjustment than a global whole-of-image change, much the same as doing a simple white balance adjustment but this time mainly increasing the saturation and warming the colour temperature.

Secondly, I then selected two corresponding sets of detailed images from the before (fake) and after (adjusted) images to compare the corals with your unadjusted image (emailed to me).

The corals are definitely not dead.  And, furthermore, allowing the possibility it was more sunny or shallower water when they took their shot, I think those details demonstrate a pretty-close match to your uncorrected ‘beige shot’ if also viewed in equivalent detail. Now, for additional confirmation they have faked the bleaching, contrast the diver’s yellow belt in my corrected images with the image as published by Ocean Agency and Flickr.

In summary:

1. The coral in that fiddled/fake image is definitely still alive.

2. It is important to observe that all (or much) of the original colour information remains in that altered image. It has just been greatly suppressed (‘washed out’) when the image was manipulated.

3. It should therefore be possible to restore the original colours by reversing the adjustment that washed them out. That is, at least to a large degree, it should be possible to restore the original colours.  As I have done.

4. When we do that, it becomes apparent that this coral was alive and unbleached when the photograph was taken.

Regards Arthur

****

And so ‘Arthur’s image’ has become the feature image at the very top of this blog post.

It is impossible to reconcile the official statistics and what is under-the-water with the media reporting – including the reporting from Glasgow. There are meant to be more cyclones and less coral, but we have quite the reverse according to the official statistics. It is also making no sense that those who purport to care so much about the Great Barrier Reef still haven’t visited it. Then there are those who have visited it once, and then there are those who have visited it but never actually got in the water. Some of them are in Glasgow.

It was not for nothing that former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull – he apparently visited Magnetic Island some years ago but never got in the water – approved a A$443 million grant to the tiny Great Barrier Reef Foundation. As far as I can tell it is paid out in little bits to all those in proximity who are prepared to lament how the corals are dying. I’ve meet so many who have received something, and so the useful idiots are paid off by the special people now in Glasgow.

On the eve of Glasgow, the same foundation put out comment:

Insufficient global action on climate change is taking a serious toll on the health of our Great Barrier Reef and coral reefs around the world. The facts are clear – coral reefs and their communities are on the front line. We know current climate change commitments don’t go far enough to protect them and we know this is the critical decade in which to act with urgency. Next month’s UN Climate Change Conference – COP26 – will be a pivotal moment in the global response to climate change.

Cyclones are a major problem for corals. They must be increasing.

On Tuesday 13th October 2020, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology put out a media release ‘Tropical Cyclone seasonal outlook for The Coral Sea’ in which it was acknowledged that, and I quote:

Recent decades have seen a decline in the number of tropical cyclones in our region.

Bureau climatologist, Greg Browning, went on to explain that this summer is likely to buck that trend, and that:

On average Australia sees 9 to 11 tropical cyclones each year, with 4 crossing the coast.

Cyclones can be devastating to coral reefs. Huge waves pound relentlessly smashing branching and fan corals. Sponges and squirts are upended. Massive Porites can be lifted and thrown metres – sometimes beyond the reef proper and onto the beach.

Given the Great Barrier Reef, as one ecosystem comprising nearly 3,000 individual reefs stretching for more than 2,000 kilometres, cyclone damaged areas can almost always be found somewhere. A coral reef that is mature and spectacular today, may be smashed by a cyclone tomorrow. So, I’m always in a hurry to visit my next reef particularly given all the modelling suggesting an inevitable increase in the number of cyclones and an inevitable decline in coral cover.

Yet!

The 2020–21 Australian region cyclone season was another ‘below average’ season, producing a total of just 8 tropical cyclones with just 3 of these categorised as severe. So since records began it is a case of less cyclones and less severe cyclones which must be good for the corals.

Perhaps not surprisingly we are also seeing an increase in coral cover, and this is exactly what the latest report from the Australian Institute of Marine Science concludes. According to their Long-Term Monitoring Program (LTMP) based on surveys of 127 reefs conducted between August 2020 and April 2021, and I quote:

In 2021, widespread recovery was underway, largely due to increases in fast growing Acropora corals.

Survey reefs experienced low levels of acute stressors over the past 12 months with no prolonged high temperatures or major cyclones. Numbers of outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish on survey reefs have generally decreased; however, there remain ongoing outbreaks on some reefs in the Southern GBR.

On the Northern GBR, region-wide hard coral cover was moderate and had continued to increase to 27% from the most recent low point in 2017.

On the Central GBR region-wide hard coral cover was moderate and had increased to 26% in 2021.

Region-wide hard coral cover on reefs in the Southern GBR was high and had increased to 39% in 2021.

Meanwhile former US President Barack Obama – who has never ever actually visited the Great Barrier Reef – confirmed he will attend the COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow. He is apparently meeting young climate change activists and highlighting their work around the world. I’m wondering when he will bring them to see the corals. The closest he has got, so far, is to Brisbane back in November 2014. He gave a speech at my old university lamenting the parlous state of the corals and claiming he wanted to take his daughters to see the corals before they were all gone.

But. We are still waiting. As far as I can tell, like Malcolm Turnbull, Barack Obama frightens the children about that which they have never actually seen or experienced with his own eyes – and with opinion that often does not even accord with the available statistics.

Former US President Bill Clinton hasn’t made it to Glasgow, but he did visit the Great Barrier Reef back in November 1996. He apparently spent a short hour snorkelling at a reef off Port Douglas.

If I didn’t know something about the scientific method, greenhouse gases, the Great Barrier Reef, and that foundation, I would be inclined to believe there was a crisis – and that there really was something I should do about it. As it is, I know that coral bleaching occurs as part of a natural cycle that will repeat irrespective of any agreements made in Glasgow. I also know as fact that there has been no increase in the incidence of cyclones and that coral cover is good and improving. It is also fact that coral reefs would benefit if there was rising sea levels because they could keep growing-up and also that they grow faster as sea temperatures increase. Did you know that there are arguably more colourful corals and even better coral cover in waters just a few degrees warmers? The warmer waters are just to the north of Australia around New Guinea and Indonesia.

UPDATE 8PM, 4TH NOVEMBER 2021

There is now an updated cyclone chart at the Bureau’s website.

And much thanks to Charles for reposting at WUWT.

***
The feature image shows a blue Acropora, one of the genera most susceptible to devastation by cyclones and one that has done well at many reefs over recent years. The photograph was taken at Pixie Reef just to the north of Cairns by me.

I lent my underwater camera (Olympus TG-6) to a dear friend who recently visited Lady Elliot Island at the Great Barrier Reef. She came over last Sunday to return the camera, and to show me some of her photographs. My favourite is of the Parrot fish just beyond the magenta-coloured corals, shared above. Over the ledge the water is deeper, and the corals have a blue haze. This is because wavelengths in the blue part of the visible light spectrum penetrate water to some few metres, while all the wavelengths in the red part of the spectrum are absorbed by 5 metres under the water.

For those who have never snorkelled or scuba-dived, and who like to lament the dying Great Barrier Reef, the corals beyond the parrot fish in Jessica’s picture might all look bleached. But that is how corals look in the distance when visibility is good, because the water is so clear. It is only when you swim up to them, when you are nearer to the corals, that you can see their real colour.

When I see photographs online and in newspapers of corals described as bleached, I often wonder how the photograph was taken – at what depth and whether it was colour corrected. I wrote to a journalist, Michael Foley from the Sydney Morning Herald, back in April about a picture purportedly showing bleached coral.

Hi Michael

I’m really impressed with your interview with Terry Hughes and particularly how much online media has republished your article ‘Reef on path to destruction and clever science can’t fix it’ and that photograph.

I was curious about the image of the bleached corals. Where it was taken, and how it was colour adjusted. I sent an email via the Catlin Seaview Survey contact page, asking for this information last Tuesday (13th April) and to Sara Naylor at UQ. The email to Sara bounced, Catlin hasn’t replied.

What I would really like is the original full resolution raw image. Could you please send me this?

Also, where was the image taken/which reef, and when/which year?

If it was taken back in 2015 or 2016 or 2017 it would be important to know the state of that coral now?

Michael Foley never replied.

There is a wonderful library on Lady Elliot Island, at the resort in a room tucked behind the museum. I spent some time there most evening when I was on the island for a week back in May. I found a photograph very similar to the one I queried Michael Foley about. It is in a book entitled ‘Coral Whisperers’ by Irus Braverman published by the University of California Press in October 2018.

The caption to this photograph provides a lot more information than the Sydney Morning Herald article by Michael Foley published on 8th April this year (2021). So, the photograph used in the article by Michael Foley was perhaps taken at Heron Island and back in February 2016.

It would seem somewhat disingenuous for a news story published on 8th April 2021 to be accompanied by a photograph from 2016 but without including this important information: that the photograph is five years old. It would also be useful if the publisher explained that visible light of a blue wavelength penetrates water, while red is absorbed, so corals even just a few metres away can have a blue haze and even appear bleached.

Also, if the Sydney Morning Herald are going to include a photograph from five years ago in a news story, why don’t they also show a more recent photograph – so we have some idea whether the coral is still there, or not?

Of course, beige is the most common colour of corals at reefs around the world, as I explained in my short documentary film ‘Beige Reef’, that you can watch on YouTube.

Update Tuesday 28th September 2021

Much thanks to Steve Messer for finding a higher resolution image of the ‘bleached corals’ here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stopadani/33675818851
(more detail with his comment in the following thread). Reproducing just a section of this photograph from Flickr (below) it is apparent that the branches are a dark tan in colour with white axial corallites and/or white tentacles extended from the corallites. This coral is not bleached at all.

Considering my SST course notes on low visibility and night diving it is apparent that with depth orange/beige begins to look very dark and then eventually black. So, if we could lift this coral to the surface the stems would perhaps be orange/beige and covered in white corallites with white tentacles extended.

I’m including a picture of an Acropora cervicornis from page 206 (volume 1) of Charlie Vernon’s ‘Corals of the World’, see below. This species of coral is from the Caribbean, not the Great Barrier Reef, but the photograph illustrates my point.

So, which species of Acropora, or perhaps Anacropora, have the experts mistaken for bleached?

****

The feature image, at the very top of this blog post, was taken at Lady Elliot Island in September 2021 by Jessica with my TG-6 camera. I also like how Jessica’s photograph so clearly shows that the Parrot fish’s teeth are fused together. These fishes eat live coral. I’ve seen them scrap the massive Porites and bite into pretty Acropora.

Everyone loves the Great Barrier Reef, particularly its corals. Everyone knows that a reef has different species of coral. But how many species should an average inshore reef have? How many corals are there at Pixie Reef, which is so close to the city of Cairns.

Such inshore reefs are apparently in terminal decline.

Flying at 150 metres altitude above Pixie Reef on 22nd March 2016 Peter Ridd’s nemesis, Terry Hughes, classified this reef as more than 65% bleached. This result was incorporated with flypasts from other reefs and reported by the media around the world as the Great Barrier Reef being more than half dead. But the names and numbers of the actual coral species that were bleached was never recorded.

School children around the world are now taught, based on the work of Hughes and others, that there is a need to fundamentally reject current sources of energy and many of our freedoms, in order to avoid mass ecosystem collapse — most specifically of the Great Barrier Reef. In short, the flypasts have become a source of Ativan great anxiety and a reason to support an economic and social reset.

I first visited Pixie Reef with marine biologist Stuart Ireland on 25th November 2020. Stuart suggested we dive Pixie because we didn’t have much time to test a method for measuring the diameter of the massive bolder corals that have growth rings like tree rings before leaving for a week at sea. We went back to Pixie reef in February 2021, again because it was conveniently close to Cairns, and I wondered how much photographic and video data on that one small reef we could gather via transects in just two days. Two days was as far was my budget would stretch at that time.

I wasn’t particularly surprised that we found the reef in such obviously good health and without bleaching, despite being listed in the supplement to an article in a most prestigious of marine science journals as mostly bleached. Indeed, there is no longer a good correspondence between what is reported in newspapers or scientific journals and reality when it comes to coral reefs.

From the two days of diving, and thanks to the hard-work and expertise of both Stuart and underwater photographer Leonard Lim, I came away with 36 video transects and also 360 photographs taken at regular intervals along 36 x 10 metre transects across three habitats: back lagoon to 11 metres depth, front of the reef to 6 metres, and also at the shallow reef crest. Each of these 360 photographs has been uploaded at my ‘Pixie Reef Data Page 2021’. The videos will be incorporated into a documentary film about Pixie Reef.

This reef may have experienced some bleaching in March 2016 — coincident with a period of minimum lunar declination and a super El Nino. But I am unaware of any photographs or video taken at that time that document in any systematic way the extent of the bleaching. And to reiterate, it is unclear which species of coral bleached. My 360 photographs were taken five years after the acclaimed bleaching of 2016. These photographs, from February 2021, suggest Pixie reef has recovered from that cycle of bleaching.

I hypothesis that this coral reef will bleach again in the summer of 2034/2035, so in about 13 years time corresponding with the next period of minimum lunar declination which I forecast will contribute to a super El Nino.

In the meantime there is perhaps an opportunity to document the number of species of coral at Pixie Reef that I hypothesis will increase over this next ten year period. In short, I’m curious to know how many coral species there are at Pixie reef for this moment in time, and if the number increases at least until 2034.

Does anyone want to guess how many different species of coral are in just the nine photographs (shown above), that are part of Table 2.1 at the Pixie Reef Data Page 2021.

Does anyone want to guess how many different species of coral might be listed for this inshore reef as at February 2021 when all the photographs are assessed? I want to know out of curiosity, and also because these same corals are essentially denied by the experts who have told the world that such coral reefs are so badly bleached they are to be pitied rather than acknowledged. Interestingly, Peter Ridd also has little time for such coral reefs, referring to them in his book (Reef Heresy) as the “mediocre fringing reefs” simply because they are “inshore reefs”. Yet as I will show, Pixie reef is not only incredibly biologically diverse but also beautiful.

I want to show and quantify this diversity, and also I’m most curious to know how long the list for the back lagoon will be, relative to the crest. At the moment the experts make no distinction between these very different habitat types at the one inshore reef when they lament coral bleaching in the popular press.

It is going to be a lot of work classifying all the species in the 360 photographs. But not impossible because the original photographs are of such high quality, providing extraordinary resolution at the scale of the corallite. Then there are such wonderful resources, including the three volumes of Charlie Vernon’s ‘Corals of the World’.

****

This research is funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation through the Institute of Public Affairs. All images are from photographs taken by Leonard Lim at Pixie Reef on 22nd or 24th February 2021.