I was nervous about taking Sky News Australia presenter and the Editor of The Spectator Australia, Rowan Dean, to John Brewer Reef. Would we really be able to find the famous coral – the badly bleached coral that had featured in The Guardian as emblematic of mass death from global warming.
I wondered and I worried. Eighteen months on. If that coral hadn’t died from global warming, might it have been eaten by a Bump Head – a type of coralliferous parrot fish in the family Scaridae.
I don’t worry about all the corals. But sometimes I worry about specific corals.
There are a lot of corals to potentially worry about.
Australian governments – especially recent Coalition governments – keep giving so much money to activist scientists who claim they can save the Great Barrier Reef?
It is still one of the seven wonders of the world. It is still visible from outer space. Visible from outer space because this coral-dominated ecosystem is so vast because there is so much coral.
Yet, our government gives hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of hard-earned taxpayer dollars for plantings of just a few corals here and there. Not even an acre of corals, sometimes it is just a few metres of corals.
I have visited a couple of these plantings.
Everyone is usually disappointed.
The few sprigs of corals that they plant usually grow. But then these same few small sprigs are sometimes gobbled up – by the large fishes.
Did you know that a single Bump Head consumes upward of 5 tonnes of live coral in one year.
These coralliferous fish hang around in groups of about 30. That’s 150 tonnes of live coral gobbled in a year!
These fishes have bellies full of coral – including taxpayer funded plantings.
I’ve jumped off the back of a boat, at a place called Bougainville Reef, and descended down 12 metres to see these Bump Heads; like a herd of buffalo across an open plain: kicking up the dust – except it is sand. And eating the grass – except it is coral.
I sometimes worry that these fishes will descent on John Brewer Reef and eat-up that one famous coral that featured in The Guardian, that was back in March last year, in March 2022.
I remember Scott Hargreaves, now Executive Director at the Institute of Public Affairs, being apprehensive about approving for me to visit. Did I really wanted to take the best underwater photographer, Stuart Ireland, to a coral reef that was making headlines around the world as the epicentre of a sixth mass coral bleaching?
I was back at that reef just two months or so ago, with Rowan Dean. I did want to show him that specific coral, as well as all the fishes at this reef that had made media headlines for all the wrong reasons.
A full 18 months after the first claims this reef would take a decade to recover from mass bleaching, we set off to find that coral.
Skipper Paul Crocombe got us to John Brewer Reef. You will see in the film launched at YouTube just today whether Rowan is brave enough to jump in, on snorkel, and find that coral. The film is called ‘Café Latte Coral’ and I’m hoping you will share it with your friends.
Is Rowan Dean going to find that coral dead, or recovered – or eaten by a Bump Head!
‘Café Latte Coral – it’s supposed to be dead!’ is an IPA production, starring Rowan Dean, produced by me (Jennifer Marohasy), filmed and edited by the best underwater cameraman who also happens to be a marine biologist, the one and only Stuart Ireland. A big thanks to Paul Crocombe who heads Adrenalin Snorkel and Dive for getting us out to John Brewer Reef.
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The feature image shows Rowan with Paul Crocombe being filmed by Stuart Ireland with Leonard Lim assisting. We set off from the Breakwater Marina, Townsville, with Adrenalin Snorkel and Dive. If you would like to see The Great Barrier Reef, and in particular visit a reef that has been described as mass death, then book a trip with Adrenalin Snorkel and Dive to John Brewer Reef.
If you only have two minutes, you can watch a short version of Café Latte Coral, click here.
If you would like to see more Bump Heads, including at Bougainville Reef, they feature in one of my very first little productions, home-made with a slow and teasing voice over, click here.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
What a Great Story, nailed it!
Frits
Excellent video. In 2019 I met a scuba diver from Melbourne on holiday in Far North Queensland with his family. I asked, “Have you been diving on the reef yet?” He replied, “What’s the point? It’s all dead”.
That’s what we’re up against.
And yet the money and starry-eyed first year marine science students keep pouring in.
I suppose that Dean is well known on SKY channel and is a rather dogmatic character on some issues. A bit like the curates egg in my opinion but seems tenacious on subjects that appeal to him. Will be interested in cyclone Jasper and its effect seaward of Willis Island.
Cherry picking locations is not science.
That is a cheap shot, Blep.
The reality is I began with a little film about the corals in Bowen Harbour back in 2019 because according to the Cairns Post they had all been destroyed by ocean acidification, global warming and sediment runoff.
That was after I first visited on my own, spending Easter 2019 there. I wrote a first blog post here, https://jennifermarohasy.com/2019/05/corals-other-side-of-mud-flat/
Then a film followed after I got some funding for the film, and bought a drone and learn how to fly it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqFFqBuFVqU
After I made that film, I was criticised because apparently all the bleaching was at the Ribbon Reefs, that is where I should have gone. So, they said.
So, I went and made a film about the Ribbons after spending a week there.
https://jennifermarohasy.com/2020/01/leaning-on-the-lookouts-at-the-great-barrier-reef/
And on and on it goes.
Tell me Blep, where should I go next. What are the names of the reefs that are dying from global warming?
Great work Jennifer. Your videos are increasingly professional. I do wish the substantial proportion of the public that have been convinced that the reef is “dead” would watch this.
Covid, Climate change, GBR
These are examples of the world, ‘catastrophising’.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing
I am afraid that every online site where a dedicated scientist is trying to present valid information or engage in thoughtful discussion to illuminate and clarify and hopefully sometimes reduce the uncertainty that surrounds so much of science has its share of resident nit-wits who insist on embarrassing themselves and contribute nothing to the discussion. Sadly they seem to delight in their stupidity. Without this site and the prodigious effort expended by Jennifer and her teams we would be poorly informed about matters which we are too far away from to know about even if we have similar scientific backgrounds and can understand fully what is actually going on in the GBR. It is extremely unlikely that the Guardian would print an apology and mea culpa, certainly not prominently. If they were to do that they would be printing nothing but mea culpas for months – perhaps no bad thing, a vast improvement on what they usually write.
Blep and their entourage are typical of the lack lustre gullible types making noise but don’t actually understand the reality of the situation, have any substance or response to their repeated parrot syndrome. These types can’t think for themselves, don’t want to know, don’t want to understand as that would spoil their blinded parrot agenda.
Blep is the do as I say, not as I do type without any credibility or knowledge, makes unfounded accusations but fails to surface when real questions are put to them basically admitting they don’t have a clue as opposed to the real Scaridae that has a real useful reef purpose
A widespread double-blind randomised reef surveys with formal statistical analysis would give meaningful data.
If every reef that is classified as dead or dying of so-called ocean acidification (a complete misrepresentation and exaggeration of normal ocean variability and buffering) or from climate change, by Australian authorities and institutions (such as AIMS) in receipt of large government (taxpayer) cash grants is then visited by Jennifer and her small team that does not receive such funding, and is discovered to be in a healthy state, or recovering from normal coral behaviour (renewal of symbiotic algae) then that is a pretty good indication of the sort of distortion that goes on. It would help if those not familiar with coral physiology learnt a bit about their resilience over some 450 million years of existence during far, far warmer periods (the majority of the last 600 million years) and during the more exacting ice ages (increasing in intensity for the last 50 million years or so). A little better perspective is needed by some over-glib commentators.
Taxpayer-funded research is expected to benefit taxpayers… Fussil fuel funded research is expected to benefit fossil fuel companies.
Overly gullible commentators fail to grasp this perspective.
Blep you obviously have no idea. Technology gets taxpayer funding and when I worked in engineering all developing technology companies get grants from government whether it be via tax relief, direct subsidies or other forms of grants.
I believe fossil fuel technology has hugely benefited and still is benefitting the taxpayer until an equivalent efficient and continuous means of power generation can be implemented. Wind and solar are inadequate due to being intermittent forms of generation which still require other base load generation (FF and hydro) to remain operational to allow them to operate in the grid.
Stuart, you obviously have no idea. Look into how Big Tobacco covered up the catastrophic health risks of smoking. The same people are now supporting and promoting fossil fuel, because that’s where the money is. Do you have grandchildren?
This delusional thinking that tax-payer funded research somehow benefits the tax payer in regard this particular agenda is quite absurd. It’s the so called research organisations that benefit and the more $$’s they get the more $$’s they want to support their own narrative, agenda and typically a pre-determined conclusion.
And those that question the tax-payer cash flow based on questionable and unethical results in well documented instances have been quickly shown the door, like how dare somebody interferes with the slush fund flow.
The reality is this whole tax-payer funded slush fund to questionable and selective research is totally one sided and until the same funding is provided to equal opportunity research institutions then there can not be any transparent credibility.
But accepting funding from Big Tobacco and fossil fuel conglomerates is fine?
Blep, There is no funding from Big Tobacco or Fossil Fuel Conglomerates for any of my work, and this latest film was funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation as shown in the credits at the end of the film. If you persist with off topic comments and innuendo I will block you from this website that does not received any funding from the IPA or another institution.
Those who could like to donate to this website and my work can do so here:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ClimateLab
Cheers, Jennifer
Tolerance of genuinely held differences of opinion supported by evidence and thoughtful discourse is what science – or indeed any topic – is all about. Over-indulgence of those who demonstrate a fundamental lack of scientific knowledge and even less desire to learn but merely denigrate and belittle others for some sort of perverse pleasure is quite another matter. Jennifer does not need and certainly does not deserve such rudeness at any time. Those who are incapable, or do not wish to behave decently and contribute positively should go somewhere else please.
Peter Etherington-Smith, do you believe that it is OK to denigrate and belittle hard-working government and university scientists as well as meteorologists, who are studying CO2, temperature / sea level increase, and reef bleaching. You know the 97 percent of scientists who have determined that climate change is real and caused by humans?
Ok, Blep, I read that Study from Cook et al (2013) several times and it looks the 1,342 (Table 5 on Page 5 of the so-called “Study”) authors out of the original sample pool of 29.083 authors finally did agree with the AGW position that humans and Fossil Fuel burning are mostly responsible for Climate Change. (I included the link to the Study below, so you can Read it for yourself and Weep!
From Page 3
“reduced the analysis to 11 944 papers
written by 29 083 authors and published in 1980 journals.”
Where I went to school 1,342 / 29,083 comes to 4.9 %. Where is your Data to support your 97% of the Scientist Statement? I do believe however that 97% of the Journalists Worldwide plus John Kerry support your position. “The unanimous block of Scientists”, the “97 Percenters”, you are talking about does not exist except for in the mind of John Kerry and a few misguided souls such as yourself and of course most of the Journalists.
Peter got it about right about you!
From Table 5:
Position Abstract rating Self-rating
Endorse AGW 791 (36.9%) 1342 (62.7%)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024/pdf
Professor Dumbledore
Read it and Weep.org
ProfDumbledore@ReaditandWeep.org
Hi Blep, you seemingly do not know that smoking is actually not deadly. You are right about some tobacco companies funding faux research and funding advertising which favours tobacco. However did you know that the longest lived male population in the world is also the heaviest smoking? The Japanese do not allow the 601 chemicals added to cigarettes, which Pauline Hanson tried to get banned and was laughed out of Parliament, by brainwashed fools. Sort of like saying we know cars can somehow kill people, so we’ll make no attempt to make them safer. However, I fail to see the connection between that and the GBR.
You have said that “fossil fuels” are sponsoring research, do you infer that Jennifer is working for them?
Did you know that Exxon was one of Al Gore’s biggest sponsors ?
Sorry, your bias is showing.
Oh and oil isn’t a “fossil fuel”, it is an element.
Professor Dumbledore… 2013?!
If the Barrier Reef is still spawning profusely that is a sign that it is healthy I reckon