Excellent news for Australia’s Barrier Reef that you just in all probability will not hear about within the media – Watts Up With That?
Dr. Peter Ridd writes on his Facebook page:
In 2016 there was a major bleaching event in the northern section of the reef.
Doom headlines made headlines around the world and Prof. Hughes, who oversaw coral monitoring, famously tweeted, “I showed my students the results of the aerial bleaching on the GBR. And then we cried “
It’s time to stop crying.
The area around Lizard Island hardest hit by this event, where coral cover has halved, has now fully recovered. It only took 5 years. Bleaching certainly caused the worst mortality rate in this area since records began in 1985. During that time, it had not been battered by cyclones like other areas further south. In future posts I will show some other regions with large natural changes in coral cover. All but the Swains region are at or above long-term averages. Some, like the Townsville area, are at record highs.
See links below.
The rapid recovery of coral in the Cooktown region is not surprising. Regardless of what our institutions say, these events are perfectly natural – they certainly did not begin in the 1970s, as many scholars like Prof. Hughes claim.
The rapid recovery also indicates an ecosystem in excellent shape. If it were on its last legs it would be difficult to recover. One of the reasons it recovers quickly is that the corals in deeper waters, which are not measured by the long-term AIMS surveys or the aerial photographs taken by Prof. Hughes, are relatively unaffected by bleaching. This means that a large amount of coral spawn is still being produced nearby, repopulating the shallow waters where the bleaching was worse. In addition, spawn can drift hundreds of kilometers from other areas.
Many thanks to the long-term monitoring team at AIMS for creating this data. They examine about a hundred reefs for coral cover every year. It’s a huge task and they have been doing it for 35 years. I have some reservations about the early data (see my book for more information), but it’s a great data set with useful quality assurance logs. I just wish I could convince AIMS to do the same with their coral coring data – but that’s another story.
The problem with this data is that it shows a calm recovery. It is good news. But good news doesn’t sell, so I doubt you’ll hear much about it in the media.
Reference links:
1 https://twitter.com/profterr…/status/722512223067721728…
2 https://www.abc.net.au/…/great-barrier-reef…/12107054https://www.aims.gov.au/…/reef/latest-surveys.html…
3 ABC-Radio-National. (2016). Widespread coral bleaching discovered on the Great Barrier Reef. [online] Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/…/widespread-coral…/7212760
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