News Feature
Great Barrier Grief
Could a perfect storm of circumstance wipe out the Reef?
September 2016
BY SAM MORTIMER
On the shallow floor of the Coral Sea lay an ancient lifeform; animals dating back some 250-million years, rejuvenating themselves using long-dead relatives as new foundations during constant shifts in environment. Sensitive, the polyps move slowly, chasing a balance of warmth and nutrition as an ever-luring sun crosses the sky. In their shadow exists an entire ecosystem of sea creatures, increasingly under threat from a spectre of conflicting interests colliding back on land. As the sparks fly and the cash flows, only one thing is for certain: things are heating up on the Reef.
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Public and political reaction was swift when reports of systemic cruelty emerged from within the New South Wales greyhound racing industry, and although coral may not be four-legged, cuddly and relatably sitting there on your living room floor, it too is an animal at risk in a high stakes game.
FEELING HOT?
Amid ongoing climate change policy debates worldwide, the first six months of this year were successively the hottest on record according to NASA, with July recording the highest average temperature of any month recorded since 1880. Despite the assertions of climate science sceptic, former coal miner, and One Nation Senator-elect Malcolm Roberts on Q&A a few weeks ago, NASA’s “corrupted” global temperature figures are being recorded locally too.
The Bureau of Meteorology reported similar record-high sea surface temperatures for February through April this year, with most of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park recording between 1 and 2.5 degrees above average across the 6 months to June. For the ancient colourful coral, this is more serious than it sounds.
Source: NASA Earth Observatory
On the back of a strong El Nino and record-high sea temperatures, the worst mass bleaching event on record is affecting coral reefs across much of the 348,00km Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. Characterised by the sudden fading of brilliant colours into a stark white, bleaching is part of a natural process corals use to control the level of symbiotic algae living within. Indirectly, it’s also a sign of an animal in distress.
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Brett Maxwell Lewis, an earth and environmental scientist at the Queensland University of Technology, has been studying bleaching in detail, examining the corals biological reaction to sustained elevated ocean temperatures and capturing stunning footage of the process for the first time. He says algae produce up to 95% of the major reef-building corals daily food, resulting in the vibrant colours we see when everything is well in their relationship. But when high sea surface temperatures move in, the algae’s photosynthate production is inhibited and they begin to oxidize, making them toxic to the host coral.
With the polyps inflating and contracting, algae expulsion began within hours of the water temperature passing 28c in Lewis’s experiments.
Source: QUT/Brett Lewis
The key point people need to understand, Lewis says, is bleached corals are still very much alive – but they’re running on reserves.
“Their daily metabolic energy is removed essentially,” he says.
“It is kind of like you or I having 95% of our food removed from our diet for long periods of time… (The coral) don’t have the nutrients in order to provide new growth, in order to fight off disease or infection. They don’t have the requirements to survive long-term in these kinds of environments.”
reports of their deaths...
Only a return to pre-bleaching conditions can encourage a proper recovery, but Lewis says the relatively slow movement on climate change is currently the Reef’s biggest threat. “Humans have this natural inertia to change,” he says.
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With 39,000 jobs directly supported by Reef tourism, and more indirectly in ancillary industries, Lewis questions the short-sightedness of recent coal industry investments when we have a sustainable natural asset on our doorstep contributing a staggering $3.3-billion on shore every year.
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“We can see there’s an issue, we can see there’s a problem, but we’ve got so much weight moving in one way that we just continue to move that direction in our stuttered stoicism because we’re so… confronted by it,” he says. “Science is constantly moving, so as a scientist it’s very frustrating to see that really natural resistance and inertia… when problems come about.”
“We just need to find a way to mitigate (bleaching). I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but there are plenty of people working on it.”
Researcher Brett Maxwell Lewis
Australians surveyed as part of a wider tourism report released in June by The Australia Institute overwhelmingly believe the Reef is more important to Queensland’s economy, and also harbor the worst views of its current condition.
So with the money flowing in and mine approvals rolling out - despite the evidence on display...
why are we so slow to properly support the Reef that supports us?
More likely to choose an alternative holiday destination if bleaching continues?
Professor Robert Gifford, an environmental psychologist from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, says our heel-dragging comes from colliding factors he calls the ‘Dragons of Inaction’. More broadly applied to climate change, the 39 dragons (and counting) were coined to describe the psychology of the beast; the intersecting differing thought processes and personal aspects that drive us. In the case of the Great Barrier Reef, Professor Gifford says its proximity and visibility are major factors, and although we’re likely more exposed to coverage of the Reef’s health, we naturally deprioritize when we feel disconnected.
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“Probably one of the biggest, scariest dragons of all… is what I call ‘lack of perceived behavioural control’,” he says. “‘Well yeah it’s too bad but what can I do about it’… There is some validity to it. Obviously everybody could do more… they don’t have to be out there swimming on the reef and fixing it directly - they could be putting more pressure on the government.”
Here be dragons...
With other more immediate problems in people’s lives taking center stage, environmental issues often take a back seat as the dragons’ roost, with misplaced optimism bias and uncertainty often rounding out the demotion of environmental issues on people’s lists of priorities.
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“We’ve done a lot of experiments in labs where as soon as a problem is a little bit less certain, then the willingness to act goes down precipitously. People have to be sure that there’s a problem before they invest effort in it,” Professor Gifford explains, adding that a general numbness to environmental reporting is compounding the problem.
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​Personal dragons aside, the science says without a long enough decrease in sea surface heat, the coral will eventually perish. With aerial surveys conducted earlier this year by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority revealing high mortality rates between Lizard Island and the tip of Cape York, that process has clearly already begun. So what can be done?
Image: New Scientist Magazine
Researcher Brett Maxwell Lewis has some straight-forward advice for those unsure of how to help constructively, however far away you may be: “I don't go into this too much because it's political, but the first thing you do is vote. Vote correctly; vote for your interests as a younger generation or an older generation, which honestly should always be the environment, because you’re not going to have any industries if you don’t have any environment.”
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The only solution it seems, is to break from being habitually human.