First hand accounts of the condition of the Great Barrier Reef?

[diver0008]

Traffic sucks. Urban sprawl is destroying nature. Middle-class wages are stagnant. Both parents have to work just to make ends meet. Health and educational systems are past the breaking point. We're all rubbing up against each other and now have to walk on eggshells. Civil unrest is rising. Massive population movements are making things worse. And now apparently we're causing the climate to change and kill coral while fishing the hell out of the oceans to feed ourselves. At what point do we say Enough! Enough people. Enough growth. We seem to be growing ourselves to misery and death.

But at least my next 3 diving trips are planned.

 

[CuzzA]

You may be forgetting it's the sheer SPEED of the HUMAN induced changes the reefs are facing, normal evolutionary processes just can't keep up, plus all the additional human induced pressures (nitrogen fertilizer/pesticide runoff, silt from harbor/cruise ship pier/overall development construction, massive overfishing, slaughter of apex predators (sharks), massive industrial accidents (ie Deepwater Horizon, etc.)...the list is endless!

Nope, not forgetting at all. But again, my purpose for starting this thread was to get to the bottom of the discrepancies being reported on the GBR. 20 posts in and still nothing.

How the wild reefs will adapt to changes in the world is still unknown. I do know corals adapt much faster to adverse conditions than people realize. We discovered this from aquarium keeping which scientist are now employing to help the reefs. We've learned we can heavily stress corals and then improve condition slightly and they will rebounded and be more resilient to future adverse conditions.

You take a typical aquarium for example where the ph of a tank in a closed building will typically be very low due to human off gassing without gas exchange from outside air and the water will be more acidic. The ocean's ph is around 8.3. The typical home aquarium will be 7.8. Nitrates are often elevated. Around 5-20 ppm and the ocean is still closer to zero. Phosphate around 1 ppm while the ocean is still zero and water temps having big fluctuations from 75-85 degrees and the ocean being much more stable. Wild corals usually take 1-12 months to adapt to these changes. Captive coral strains that haven't seen the ocean in decades can move around to different environments and adapt very quickly.

My point is simply to point out that corals do in fact adapt and change to survive different conditions. It doesn't take a thousand years of evolution. Perhaps having the ability to adapt to different conditions is built in to coral DNA through evolution.

Now, I'm NOT suggesting we carry on doing what we're doing to the planet. I'm just addressing the speed at which corals can adapt. We can only hope our governments will start taking sensible measures to protect out environment and also not hurt people. It's not that hard to do if they truly cared.

 

[dfx]

My point is simply to point out that corals do in fact adapt and change to survive different conditions. It doesn't take a thousand years of evolution. Perhaps having the ability to adapt to different conditions is built in to coral DNA through evolution.

I'm not the author, but my understanding of the "pronounced dead" articles is not that the reef is dead now, but rather that it's in a "dead man walking state," meaning that even though some or even most parts are still alive now, there is no path to survival or recovery if things continue unchanged.

The idea that coral can simply adapt is not plausible to me as coral reefs only exist where conditions fall into a very narrow margin and nowhere else. And while some coral species may indeed adapt and others perhaps migrate to where conditions are more favourable, either way if GW continues, things will be different from what they are now.

 

[CuzzA]

Great Barrier Reef Obituary Goes Viral, To The Horror Of Scientists | Huffington Post

Dead and dying are two very different things.

If a person is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, their loved ones don’t rush to write an obituary and plan a funeral. Likewise, species aren’t declared extinct until they actually are.

In a viral article entitled “Obituary: Great Barrier Reef (25 Million BC-2016),” however, writer Rowan Jacobsen proclaimed ― inaccurately and, we can only hope, hyperbolically ― that Earth’s largest living structure is dead and gone.

“The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness,” reads the sensational obituary, published Tuesday in Outside Magazine. “It was 25 million years old.”

Two leading coral scientists that The Huffington Post contacted took serious issue with Outside’s piece, calling it wildly irresponsible.​

 

[RyanT]

CuzzA:

You are correct that corals are adaptable. They can withstand bleaching and recover. They can bleach and die and the reef can recover. But aside from temperature, coral reefs are now often under multiple stressors. For example, overfishing changes the dynamics of reef herbivores, coral disease decimate some species, storms kill corals and nutrient inputs increase algal growth. When these stressors are combined, there comes a point when recovery can no longer happen and this has been well documented, referred to as a phase-shift.

As a scientist, I read the weekly reports in science journals. The GBR and other reefs are indeed in serious trouble in the coming decades. The science is very clear on this. I am always a little disturbed when someone claims that global warming/reef destruction/fill in your issue here, is overblown. In these cases, the challenge I provide is to go to the original science papers, read them, and explain where the actual studies are flawed.

So read the science reports. Are all science reports 100% correct? No. Is any one particular science method better than another? No. But the beauty of science is that as the data accumulate, they collectively paint a clearer picture of the state of our coral reefs.

Interestingly, you mentioned that coral reef ranges have changed over the history of Florida. Indeed ranges have contracted and expanded. A recent paper (link below) shows that due to increasing turbidity with latitudinal gradients, coral reefs will be unable to expand their ranges as the climate warms. So again, there are limits to coral reef adaptability. You also claimed that scientists cannot tell if corals have bleached in the past by taking cores from dead corals. Actually they can. It's a process called stable isotope analysis. As corals grow and/bleach, they deposit different amounts of two naturally occurring radio isotopes in their skeletons. Since zooxanthellae are algae and corals are animals, they will deposit different levels of isotopes into the skeleton. An analysis of these isotope ratios can reveal a tremendous amount about the health of the coral when it was alive.

I agree that the "reporting" in Outside magazine was irresponsible. But it is important to keep in mind that Outside magazine is NOT peer-reviewed science.

http://bio.classes.ucsc.edu/bio160/Bio160readings/Catastrophes, Phase Shifts.pdf

Limited scope for latitudinal extension of reef corals | Science

Stable isotope geochemistry of corals from Costa Rica as proxy indicator of the EL Niño/southern Oscillation (ENSO)

 

[HalcyonDaze]

It's been almost 12 years since I was on the GBR and I don't know of anyone who's been there recently; however I found this article from The Guardian to be fairly in-depth: The Great Barrier Reef: a catastrophe laid bare

First off, to note the scale of the issue, the GBR is approximately, 2,300 km long and consists of over 3,000 individual reefs. Anything covering that kind of distance is not going to be evenly affected across its entire extent, especially considering that one would expect the worst damage to be in the northern part, closer to warm equatorial waters.

According to the article, 93% of those 3,000 reefs were found to have some extent of bleaching - i.e., the coral is stressed and has expelled the symbiotic algae that provide most of its nutrients, but is still alive (although it's in danger of dying). In terms of dead coral, 22% of the overall reef is dead; of that mortality ~85% is in the northern section of the reef (again, warmest conditions) with the central and southern sections of the reefs still being in relatively good shape (~15% mortality).

The takeaway is that the GBR is not "dead" and whoever wrote that "obituary" should be ashamed of themselves. Exaggeration for the sake of shock value is one element that feeds denial of the impact humans are having on the environment; if there's an element of "crying wolf" being injected into the discussion it's harder for the public to take real warnings seriously. And in this instance there are real warnings - bleaching and mortality on this scale is very bad news, and according to the projections within 20 years the conditions that prompted it could be occurring every other year rather than once every 20 years. Even if the reef can recover from this event, climate change and other factors such as agricultural runoff will keep hammering it.

As a card-carrying scientist who works with coastal engineers and a Miami resident, I find the concept of denying global warming laughable. I go out to Miami Beach during a king tide and there's seawater coming up through the storm drains. Boat ramps and seawalls throughout South Florida are submerged. And if you want an illustration of "Well, the climate has changed before," scroll through this: xkcd: Earth Temperature Timeline

 

[charlier]

Although, I rarely comment on climate and environmental issues on a public forum, my thoughts are (1) the GBR has suffered much bleaching during the past El Niño event, but not to the extent suggested in the article, (2) the original piece from Outside Magazine overstates the coral die off and bleaching on the GBR, (3) the article misrepresents the complexity and extent of ocean acidification, (4) Corals are not adapting to such rapid warming events, and (5) pH is only one of many factors that promote coral health and survival. I tried to keep my post on point and tried not to be dismissive of any posts or comments.

 

[CuzzA]

Great posts. I know I originally suggested not to get into the climate debate because it usually doesn't end well and that really wasn't the purpose of this thread. But naturally it goes with the topic.

I was a climate skeptic before and changed my positions a while back. Much of the reasons why I was a skeptic were because of the evidence of scientists fudging numbers and realizing there were political and monetary motivations behind a lot of the solutions being presented. Those two things really hurt major progress to cleaning up our act, so to speak. The carbon tax idea was the nail in the coffin. The public won't go for solutions that are going to harm their families. It's a shame our governments won't start producing sound solutions.

I hope my earlier posts didn't come across as being a denier or that I'm doubting the state our oceans are in. I held back much of what I could say on the topic, simply because my goal was to hear from SB members who are actually diving these reefs and I didn't want to see this thread turn ugly and perhaps turn people away.

I'm not a marine scientist, but reef keeping has taught me a lot. It also taught me to change my ways. No fertilizers, reducing energy consumption, etc. I hope the GBR and the rest of the worlds reefs survive and us humans change our ways.

 

[RyanT]

Hey CuzzA, yes, great discussion! Here's something I want to lay out in terms of "scientists fudging numbers." Unfortunately, there has been a recent spate of "fudging" across scientific disciplines that have come to light. A number of papers have recently been retracted due to scientific misconduct. These papers span the fields from ecology to developmental biology (cloning). Sadly this misconduct does tarnish the entire field of science. Fortunately, this misconduct is dealt with swiftly and harshly within the scientific community.

It is really important to note, however, that for the climate change work, the leaked emails were blown out of proportion and misrepresented. Many of the leaked emails about scientists talking about "tricks of data" etc. were largely taken out of context. As any human, we scientists make shorthand comments and joke about things through email. Sadly, these emails were propagated as scientists "fudging data."

As a scientist who has received federal grant money for research, I can tell you the process of how this works is far different from what is painted in the media. Seriously, scientists make very little money from our research. The vast majority of the grant money goes to support student education and the remainder actually goes back into the economy, buying services from companies to buy products or services for travel. (If anyone is interested, I would be happy to expand on how this works, just seems beyond the scope of the current discussion).

As I said before, the beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting field. As scientists, we fight among ourselves to advocate our individual views, based on the data we collected from our particular studies. But at the end of end of the day, our knowledge emerges from the consensus of thousands of studies that converge to point us in the right direction.

Currently, the consensus scientific view of climate change and coral reef declines makes it very clear that we are in bad shape.

 

[clownfishsydney]

My wife and I spent some 6 months sailing our yacht in Queensland last year and we dived quite a number of coral reefs. The places we went to had what I considered good coral, but not outstanding. As I had never dived these locations before, I cannot compare what they might have been like before. However, one location, Lady Musgrave Island, is relatively close to Heron Island where I dived almost 30 years ago. From my memory, Lady Musgrave was similar to Heron in terms of coral.

In early November we are going on a liveaboard trip to Far North Queensland. This trip starts and ends at Thursday Island (at the top of the pointy bit - Cape York) and we spend 8 nights out on the reef, especially the Great Detatched Reef. If I remember, I will update this post with my views after we return to civilisation.