The Great Barrier Reef: what's being done to save the world's largest living structure

On World Oceans Day Sarah Rodrigues takes a deep dive into the Great Barrier Reef where a 'see it, love it, save it' approach is helping protect the world's largest coral reef system.

Sat, 08 Jun, 2024 - 02:00

Like many people who lived through covid, I’ve spent more than my fair share of time hanging about in nurseries over the past few years.

Even when not obsessively buying plants, being surrounded by growing, beautiful things has been soothing.

I had a similar sensation in the Biobank, a darkened space within the Cairns Aquarium, where operations manager Paul Myers is guiding me through raised beds of tiny corals.

A pink brain, ridged and rippled, sits beside more fluid spaghetti-like structures: glam metal singers in slow motion.

Here, in the world’s first living coral biobank, these fragments of corals are being preserved as insurance against future dangers to the Great Barrier Reef which, covering an area of around 350,000sq km is the largest living structure on earth.

Carefully removed by divers from mature, healthy structures on the reef, they are DNA tested, microchipped and attached to metal plates within huge cribs, where the water and light mimic outside conditions.

It’s difficult, and somewhat poignant, to fathom that anything so small and so delicate as these coral samples could ever be needed to protect something so vast.

The ultimate aim, Myers says, is to collect samples of all of the around 600 species of coral on the Great Barrier Reef. He points to a staghorn, which has almost tripled in size since arriving at the Biobank.

Perversely, this type of coral grows quickly but is also one of the most susceptible to breakage; more robust corals take longer to develop.

It’s only since the mass bleaching events of recent years that visitors to the Great Barrier Reef have started to take an interest in how the reef functions, and what the unique characteristics of its inhabitants are, says Myers.

Despite having spent 15 years as a dive instructor on the reef, he admits to having been relatively clueless about coral species until doing an identification course a few years ago: not only is the practice incredibly difficult but, tellingly, it simply hadn’t been something that most people felt compelled to know about.

A key collaborator on the project, Charlie Veron, who in 1972 was the reef’s first-ever full time researcher, is one of the few people in the world expertly versed in identifying coral species.

The fact that tourists increasingly desire to learn more about the inhabitants of the underwater worlds (worlds in which we can only ever hope to be visitors) seems proof to me that the ‘see the reef, love the reef, protect the reef’, mantra adopted by the relevant tourist and conservation boards is working.

In Landmarks (2015) (his love song to disappearing landscapes and the words associated with them) British naturalist and author Robert Macfarlane writes about ‘particularising’; about how we are more invested in something when we have a distinct name for it.

It’s why humans name their babies, and why environmentalist Roger Deakin noted that his wish was for “my writing to bring people not just to think of ‘trees’ as they mostly do now, but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.”

Further proof comes by way of the fact that Cairns stalwart, Passions of Paradise (passions.com.au) which was established in 1987 by the indomitable, charming and passionate Alan Wallish was, until recently, offering their ‘Marine Biologist for a Day’ tour - launched in 2021, just once a week. Demand has upped availability to daily.

Setting out from Cairns’ Marlin Marina on a Passions expedition, it’s impossible to not draw comparisons between 2001, when I was here to qualify for my Advanced Padi [diving certification] with another operator, and now.

Certainly, there were some cautionary words about keeping our hands to ourselves and not kicking our flippers too vigorously near coral beds, but there were no on-board talks about reef health, nor mini-libraries of books, detailing the characteristics of reef inhabitants.

Wallish was on board on the day of my dives, and happy to speak with me about recent bleaching events and the changes he’s witnessed in his nearly 40 years of operation.

While I was optimising my underwater leisure time to conduct a citizen scientist survey with a Master Reef Guide, he was checking on his coral nurseries: underwater rope structures on which coral fragments (in this case, collected from breakages rather than surgically removed) have been planted.

Perhaps inevitably, some cynics assume from a distance that reef tour operators gloss over an impending (underwater) Armageddon to keep their businesses alive.

The reality is far more complex than that. After all, nobody is denying that the Great Barrier Reef balances on a knife-edge.

After 2016’s catastrophic bleaching event, David Attenborough described it as being “in grave danger” thanks to the “twin perils brought by climate change: an increase in the temperature of the ocean and in its acidity”.

Around the same time, Veron said that in his view, “we are precipitating the conditions for a mass extinction. It is as bad as that.”

Clown Fish on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia.

It leads me to wonder why people, cynical or not, would suspect that a commercial operator would dare to argue against the opinions of hard-hitters such as these, even if it were a matter of their livelihood being at stake.

What hope would they have? Who would take them seriously?

“The reef has suffered in recent years, there’s no question of that,” says Wallish, “but corals are remarkably resilient. It’s not that they can’t survive changing conditions; it’s just that conditions are changing far too rapidly. Every visitor to the reef can impact its future not only by the compulsory payment of the ‘reef tax’ included in their excursion fee, (which is directed towards research and replanting) but in taking away the knowledge of how they can act, regardless of where they are, to reduce CO2 emissions and, therefore, rising ocean temperatures.”

A lesson that I only learned recently, despite having dived there, and elsewhere, is that coral is formed of clusters of animals, polyps, and that they gain their colour from inhabiting algae, called zooxanthellae.

In the same way that a struggling human might push a friend away during a stressful time, corals expel their colourful pals when temperatures rise and times get tough. You might say that they can’t take the heat … so they kick someone else out of the kitchen.

Yet while bleaching episodes are traumatic and visually startling, especially in shallower waters where the temperatures are, naturally, higher, they don’t necessarily spell the end.

Provided that the waters cool down within a few weeks, the algae will return to their hosts and glow them up from within again.

Funds and fear permitting, it’s also worth learning to dive, to access the deeper, colder waters where corals teem with life and movement.

Indeed, vivid colour is not the only thing to look for. “Yes, many people assume that bleached coral is irreversibly dead,” says my dive buddy and Master Reef Guide Corinda de Mooij.

“There’s also a misconception that healthy corals are neon-bright. But is this what we expect above ground? Flowers, trees, plants. They come in all shades, and change according to the seasons and conditions. It’s the same underwater.”

Armed with the knowledge that the presence, or absence, of certain creatures is a powerful indicator of reef health, Corinda and I descend into the blue and survey our surroundings, making notes and number estimates on waterproof boards.

Parrotfish nibble greedily at branching structures, their evident satisfaction demonstrating the existence of algae within.

Sea cucumbers, surely the underwater world’s equivalent of Jabba the Hutt, form slug-like proof of life: their hoover-style role on the reef bed is not only essential, but also unworkable if the reef is not healthy enough to be hoovered.

This ‘Marine Biologist for a Day’ is part of the Eye on the Reef initiative and will see our survey results sent to a central bank to be combined with the investigative results from other divers. Marine Park managers and scientists are then able to use the data to predict environmental impacts, as well as to make decisions aimed at protecting the Great Barrier Reef.

Soundbites and headlines, especially the gloomy ones, are easy takeaways, but the reef, its health, and its hopes are far more nuanced than a declaration of ‘dead’ or ‘dying.’

Furthermore, it’s only via education, by visiting somewhere like the Biobank or indeed, the Great Barrier Reef itself, that this World Heritage Site begins to make sense.

See it, love it, protect it, know what’s at risk and begin to understand how your everyday actions, on or off the reef, can make a difference.

After all, corals don’t have brains: it’s high time we used ours.

Queensland Coast & Hinterland