Great Barrier Reef

We live in an era when it is politically incorrect to say the Great Barrier Reef is doing fine, except if it’s in a tourist brochure. The issue has nothing to do with the actual state of corals, but something else altogether.

Given that the Great Barrier Reef is one ecosystem comprising nearly 3000 individual reefs stretching for 2000 kilometres, damaged areas can always be found somewhere. And a coral reef that is mature and spectacular today may be smashed by a cyclone tomorrow – although neither the intensity nor frequency of cyclones is increasing at the Great Barrier Reef, despite climate change. Another reason that coral dies is because of sea-level fall that can leave some corals at some inshore reefs above water on the lowest tides. These can be exceptionally low tides during El Niño events that occur regularly along the east coast of Australia.

A study published by Reef Check Australia, undertaken between 2001 to 2014 – where citizen scientists followed an agreed methodology at 77 sites on 22 reefs encompassing some of the Great Barrier Reef’s most popular dive sites – concluded that 43 sites showed no net change in hard coral cover, 23 sites showed an increase by more than 10 per cent (10–41 per cent, net change), and 17 sites showed a decrease by more than 10 per cent (10–63 per cent, net change).

Studies like this, which suggest there is no crisis but that there can be change, are mostly ignored by the mainstream media. However, if you mention such information and criticise university academics at the same time, you risk being attacked in the mainstream media. Or in academic Dr Peter Ridd’s case, you could be sacked by your university.

After a career of 30 years working as an academic at James Cook University, Dr Ridd was sacked essentially for repeatedly stating that there is no ecological crisis at the Great Barrier Reef, but rather there is a crisis in the quality of scientific research undertaken and reported by our universities. It all began when he sent photographs to News Ltd journalist Peter Michael showing healthy corals at Bramston Reef, near Stone Island, off Bowen in north Queensland.

More recently, I personally have been ‘savaged’ – and in the process incorrectly labelled right wing and incorrectly accused of being in the pay of Gina Rinehart – by Graham Readfearn in an article published in The Guardian. This was because I supported Dr Ridd by showing in some detail a healthy coral reef fringing the north-facing bay at Stone Island in my first film, Beige Reef.

According to the nonsense article by Mr Readfearn, quoting academic Dr Tara Clark, I should not draw conclusions about the state of corals at Stone Island from just the 25 or so hectares (250,000 square metres) of near 100 per cent healthy hard coral cover filmed at Beige Reef on 27 August 2019. Beige Reef fringes the north-facing bay at Stone Island.

This is hypocritical – to say the least – given Dr Clark has a paper published by Nature claiming the coral reefs at Stone Island are mostly all dead. She based this conclusion on just two 20-metre long transects that avoided the live section of healthy corals seaward of the reef crest.

I will refer to this reef as Pink Plate Reef – given the pink plate corals that I saw there when I went snorkelling on 25 August 2019.

Dr Clark – the senior author on the research report, which also includes eight other mostly high-profile scientists – is quoted in The Guardian claiming I have misrepresented her Great Barrier Reef study. In particular, she states,

We never claimed that there were no Acropora corals present in 2012.”

Yet this is really the only conclusion that can be drawn from the information presented in her report, which states in different sections the following:

Using a combination of anecdotal, ecological and geochemical techniques, the results of this study provide a robust understanding of coral community change for Bramston Reef and Stone Island.”

At Stone Island, the reef crest was similar to that observed in 1994 with a substrate almost completely devoid of living corals.”

For Stone Island, the limited evidence of coral growth since the early 19th Century suggests that recovery is severely lagging.”

… by 1994 the reef was covered in a mixture of coral rubble and algae with no living Acropora and very few massive coral colonies present …”

Clark and colleagues recorded the corals along two transects, which they explain included a section of the reef now stranded above the mean low spring sea level. The sections they studied are some metres away from healthy corals – Porites and Acropora species, including pink plate corals that I snorkelled over on 25 August 2019.

Fringing inshore reefs often show distinct zonation, with live and healthy corals growing along the seaward edge. At Pink Plate Reef, the reef edge extends for some 2 kilometres and is about 20 metres wide in parts, while much narrower in other sections.

The more inshore section of such fringing inshore reefs, sometime referred to as ‘the lagoon’ between the beach and the reef edge, is usually muddy. This mud has a terrestrial origin. From the lagoon towards the seaward edge there may be an elevated section, which is often referred to as the reef crest.

It is uncontroversial in the technical scientific literature that there has been sea-level fall of about 1.5 metres at the Great Barrier Reef since a period known as the Holocene High Stand thousands of years ago.

It is also uncontroversial that sea levels fall with the El Niño events that occur regularly along the east coast of Australia most recently during the summer of 2015–2016.

As a consequence, the reef crest at many such inshore fringing reefs may end up above the height of mean low spring sea level. This is too high for healthy coral growth; because of sea-level fall, corals in this section of these reefs are often referred to as ‘stranded’ and will be dead.

Dr Clark and colleagues clearly state that they began their transects at Stone Island at the reef crest, which they also acknowledge is at ‘the upper limit of open water coral growth’. It could reasonably be concluded that Dr Clark’s study set out to sample the section of this reef that could be referred to as stranded.

Our society places enormous trust in scientists. It is as though they are the custodians of all truth.

Yet, as recently reported in another article in The Guardian by Sylvia McLain on 17 September, entitled ‘Not breaking news: many scientific studies are ultimately proved wrong!’, most scientific studies are wrong because scientists are interested in funding their research and their careers rather than the truth.

So, while another The Guardian journalist, Graham Readfearn, may look to scientists like Dr Clark and colleagues to know the truth about the Great Barrier Reef, reef scientists may be inclined to report what is best for their career in the longer term. This is increasingly likely to be the case, given the recent sacking of Dr Ridd for daring to speak against the consensus.

This could also to be the case for film makers. The Guardian has reported my honest attempts at showing how beautiful and healthy one of the fringing coral reefs at Stone Island is – including through spectacular wide angle underwater cinematography – the headline:

Scientists say rightwing think tank misrepresented her Great Barrier Reef study”.

This was the headline in The Guardian on Tuesday, accompanying the first review of my first film – Beige Reef. Many of the comments at YouTube now uncritically link to this misinformation.

It is not easy telling the truth when it comes to the state of corals at the Great Barrier Reef.

In my film Beige Reef, I show such a diversity of beautiful hard corals including species of Acropora and Turbinaria under dappled light at Beige Reef, which is a true coral garden fringing the north facing bay at Stone Island.

Meanwhile, Tara Clark and colleagues – lauded by journalists such as Graham Readfearn – write in their study published by Nature: ‘Only nine dead corals were found along transects 1 and 2, and that these corals were covered in mud and algae.’

Such a statement is perhaps politically smart, because it plays to the current zeitgeist that suggests humankind is having a terrible impact – destroying the planet everywhere, including at the Great Barrier Reef. So, the beautiful reefs that do fringe Stone Island – not just Beige Reef in the north facing bay, but also the reef along the south western edge, the reef that I’ve name Pink Plate – must be denied.

It seems an absolute tragedy to me that the beauty and resilience of these healthy coral reefs is not acknowledged. Further, the idea that the Great Barrier Reef is in peril creates tremendous anxiety throughout our community, particularly for the younger generation.

In another part of the same report, Dr Clark and colleagues state that coral cover was 0.09 per cent at Stone Island. This is not consistent with their ‘benthic survey’ only finding nine dead corals, and is certainly a lot less than the near 100 per cent coverage that I found at Beige Reef just around the corner. It is also a lot less than would have been found if their transects had been placed in that section of Pink Plate Reef with living corals – the section of reef at the seaward edge that extended for perhaps 2 kilometres.

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Pink Plate Reef will be the focus of my next short film.

My travel to Stone Island and the film were funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation through the Institute of Public Affairs.

I snapped the picture of the sailing boat with Gloucester passage in the background, as featured at the top of this blog post, from Pink Plate Reef in the early afternoon on 25th August 2019.

FRENCH military general Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted as saying that, “A good sketch is better than a long speech.” Then there is the expression, ”A picture is worth a thousand words.”

So, why have I spent so much of the last two decades writing, rather than sketching or painting or better still making movies — given my often overwhelming desire to communicate something.

I have sometimes placed ‘illustrations’ with my words, most usually time series charts that describe relationships by way of the number plane. I intend to keep doing this, and I am still working closely with Jaco Vlok on an historical temperature reconstruction for Australia that will include so many ‘sketches’ as time series charts of monthly temperate data.

But over the next couple of years I also want to support Peter Ridd as he battles James Cook University through the courts, and more generally communicate the beauty and resilience of the main point of contention: the Great Barrier Reef.

The best medium for doing this is surely underwater cinematography?

Back in April, I showed you some of my underwater snap shots from duck-diving off Bowen.

In that blog post I also wrote:

“Someone needs to go down with a good camera and a tank of oxygen and get extensive footage that shows the great diversity, and all the fish – there might even be a crocodile hiding somewhere.”

By August I had found that someone, Clint Hempsall. He has spent a lifetime capturing the beauty, the sometimes raw horror, and the resilience of life beneath the waves.

We loaded his camera gear into my land cruiser at Noosa and drove the 1,000 kilometres to Bowen. Clint filmed non-stop, and we now have so much footage of so many inshore reefs, including the reef with the crocodile.

This adventure would not have been possible without Rob McCulloch. Between so many overseas trips where he skippered important people on three-storey boats, Rob found time to discussed logistics for Bowen with me, and told me he would be there and with a boat from the very beginning. He is the perfect Skipper, and a great friend.

I am planning to make a lot more short documentaries — not just of these inshore reefs for which we already have footage including interviews with Peter Ridd at Bramston Reef — but also of more colourful corals in clearer waters at the outer ribbon reefs and from coral cays.

I have just confirmed a next adventure for January 2020. That diving and filming will be from a bigger boat and I will have a compressed air tank on my back.

This blog post, however, is about my very first film, it is about Beige Reef.

I still remember so vividly the dappled light and the rocking of the tide as I floated over the corals at this inshore reef in the north facing bay of Stone Island.

After snorkelling with Walter Starck, I launched my drone and some of that footage features in Beige Reef.

This was only the second time I had flown a drone from a boat, and conditions were thankfully calmer than the day before when there was quite a swell but I still managed to launch and catch. Rob filmed my very first launch, and he will be showing this to his Facebook friends in the next week or so.

Beige reef is a fringing coral reef of approximately 25 hectares in warm and shallow waters at the entrance to Bowen Harbour. It is an inshore reef that according to the scientific literature should not exist, as I explain in Beige Reef.

I am also grateful to the B. Macfie Family Foundation for their continuing financial support, and also to the Institute of Public Affairs especially John Roskam and Scott Hargreaves.

The film was shown just yesterday to some IPA members in Brisbane, and the first launch of Beige Reef was to a small group in the IPA board room in Collins Street in Melbourne.

Consider joining the IPA at https://ipa.org.au/join, so that you know about my next short documentary, and have the opportunity to join-in at future events.

CORAL reefs in shallow waters adjacent to the Australian mainland are considered particularly susceptible to coral bleaching, and also smothering by sediment from turbid water. This was all lamented a week or so ago, including by Sussan Ley, the Federal Environment Minister. Relying on a review of more than 1,000 reports by academics who don’t get out enough, she told the nation that the prognosis for the Great Barrier Reef, and particularly inshore reefs, is very poor.

One of the papers that helped shaped this opinion is by Tara Clark (and colleagues) entitled ‘Historical photographs revisited: A case study for dating and characterising recent loss of coral cover on the inshore Great Barrier Reef’ published by Nature (DOI: 10.1038/srep19285).

The historical photographs were taken circa 1890 and 1915 of corals in the vicinity of Stone Island, off Bowen, and they show healthy corals including species of the branching coral Acropora spp.. The historic photographs have Gloucester Island and Gloucester passage as an iconic backdrop.

Tara Clark and colleagues concluded in the peer-reviewed paper published in 2016 that:

Using a combination of anecdotal, ecological and geochemical techniques, the results of this study provide a robust understanding of coral community change for Bramston Reef and Stone Island. In the late 19th and early 20th Century, historical photographs revealed large and abundant living tabular Acropora sp. and massive faviid colonies at Bramston Reef and high cover of both plating and branching Acropora sp. colonies at Stone Island. By contrast in 1994, no living Acropora colonies were found at either location and the majority of the large faviids that featured so prominently at Bramston Reef in c.1890 were dead, covered in algae and/or mud.

And further that:

In 2012 (eighteen years later), Bramston Reef was still characterized by many large faviid colonies, dead and overgrown by algae and sediment, as well as a large number of small living faviid colonies. Yet there was evidence of some small increase in coral cover, primarily driven by tabular Acropora sp. and other genera. In addition, living faviid colonies that appeared to be of equal size to their predecessors were also found in 2012, albeit scarc. At Stone Island, the reef crest was similar to that observed in 1994 with a substrate almost completely devoid of living corals.”

I visited Stone Island late August, and was surprised to find an abundance of Acropora spp. forming both plate and branching colonies. I saw and photographed large pink plate coral on 25th August — some more than 1 metre in diameter — at the reef edge just 30 metres from where Tara Clark and colleagues ended their transect as published in Nature.

I’ve named this coral reef — that Clark and others claim doesn’t exist — Clint’s reef after Clint Hempsall, the underwater cinematography who spent over an hour filming there on 25th August 2019.

This footage will hopefully be included in the film we are making about the inner reefs of the northern Whitsundays: an area that includes Bowen harbour and Stone Island. The footage should also be archived, so that like the 1890 and 1914 photographs it is available as a historic record, a snapshot in time of the state of these reefs.

The two days later, on 27th August, we visited a reef just around the headland from Clint’s reef, in the southern corner of the north-facing bay at Stone Island. The coral coverage here was much more extensive, and this bay also has a view across to Gloucester Island and Gloucester passage.

At this reef, that I’m calling Beige reef, my colleagues Rob McCulloch and Walter Starck estimated close to 100% coral coverage over perhaps twenty-five (25) hectares. I want to return to this reef and map it with my drone (Skido, of course).

There are two dominant coral species at Beige Reef – an Acropora sp. and Turbinaria mesenterina.

The genus Acropora is distinguished by having axial corallites at the tip of each branch, that are different in size, form and often colour from the radial corallites on the same branch. At Beige reef you can easily distinguish the axial corallites on the dominant Acropora species because they are florescent and glow either white or purple. So the branch is beige and the tip white or purple.

I’ve read that such shallow-water reef-building corals with these photoproteins that fluoresce are more resistant to bleaching when the photoproteins are positioned above the zooxanthellae to protect them from harsh light, as is in the case with this Acropora species at Beige reef. Bleaching occurs when the symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) are expelled when temperatures become too hot or too cold. Apparently in some deep water corals that fluoresce, the photoproteins are below the zooxanthellae to reflect the light back.

There are apparently over 130 species of Acropora and I would be keen to know the actual species at Beige reef… with these florescent tips.

Does anyone want to hazard a guess as to the specific species of Acropora that I have photographed?

It is possible to see the corallite and the tentacles in the close-up photograph.

I’m just learning how to take such pictures that are important for accurate coral identification. The next stage will be to include a scale, for reference … to know the size of the corallites.

Beige reef is a shallow inshore reef that would be more suspecting to bleaching from both exposure at low tide and also the water heating-up than any of the other reefs I snorkelled off-Bowen. Yet surprisingly there was little evidence of bleaching here — or at the other reefs.

The most damaged of the eight reefs that we snorkelled was at Middle Island, with much of the reef to the south-west of the island reduced to rubble by Cyclone Debbie which struck in early 2017.

The other dominant coral species at Beige Reef is Turbinaria mesenterina. This is a type of foliose coral in the family Dendrophylliidae. The individual polyps fuse to form what are called unifacial laminae, that look something like lettuce leaves made of limestone and all with a white trim.

I’ve read that this coral can self-clean, which is perhaps handy given it lives in relatively turbid inshore waters. Indeed there are mudflats and mangroves at Stone Island, and the Abbot Point coal terminal is not far away, as shown on the map.

These ‘lettuce leaf’ corals were mostly beige in colour, though there were also corals of the same species (T. mesenterina) that were a deep purple, as shown in the second photograph at the very top of this blog post. Both the purple and white forms have the same white trim around the perimeter.

Of course, the colour of a coral has everything to do with the species of symbiotic zooxanthellae, which is the species of symbiotic algae that lives in the coral. So, the same species of coral may be different colours and different species of coral the same colour.

At Beige reef there are a lot of corals that are a delicate beige colour, which is perhaps not for everyone. But I thought it a most beautiful coral reef.

It is a pity that this reef, Beige reef, is denied in the scientific report by Tara Clark and colleagues as published by Nature in 2016. And I find it surprising that Minister Ley can be so negative about the inshore reef because this was not my experience at all having just spent 10 days exploring 8 mostly inshore reefs in the Whitsundays including Beige and Clint Reefs that fringe Stone Island.

UPDATE 06/09/2019: THERE WAS AN ERROR WITH A DATE (I PHOTOGRAPHED THE PLATE CORAL AT CLINT’S REEF ON 25TH, NOT 26TH) AND I’VE MADE A COUPLE OF OTHER EDITS JUST NOW … 1PM ON 6TH SEPTEMBER. THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE. ALSO, I’VE ADDED A PHOTOGRAPH. I SHALL STOP NOW. JEN

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Beige reef has been flown over with my drone, and there is over an hour of underwater cinematography from Clint Hempsall. This footage all needs to be archived … but first some of it will hopefully be included as part of a short film just on Beige reef and then there will be the longer film about all eight reefs. Subscribe at my website so you know when.