Photo by: Elizabeth Steele-Collins

A fine of $4,000 was given to a man from Southern Australia, because he invaded the personal space of two whales off the south coast.

For the first time ever in South Australia, Philip Kluske, who resides in the Victor Harbor area, was tried and found guilty, in the Christies Beach Magistrates Court this past Monday, of piloting a vessel within 100 meters of two whales in August of 2009.

Apparently, as the court heard, Mr. Kluske became intrigued with the whales as they approached his boat, and when they swam off he pursued them.

All things considered, Kluske got off light. The maximum penalty that can be given under such circumstances is a $100,000 fine or a two year stint in the pen.

Laurence Haegi, regional conservator of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources has explained that the rules in place are just as important for the welfare of the animals, as they are for the safety of the public.

‘Southern right whales are a vulnerable species, protected under the National Parks and Wildlife Act,’ Dr Haegi said in a statement after the case. ‘Today, the greatest threats to whales are entanglements and boat strikes resulting from human interference”.

‘The regulations are in place to ensure these magnificent animals are not harassed and stressed, often at a time when they are nurturing young calves.’

There you have it… If a whale swims away… Leave it alone… Whale harassment can land you in some pretty hot water.

Elizabeth Steele-Collins

Great Barrier Reef

New research has discovered that seaweed is leeching the life right out of the Great Barrier Reef and annihilating coral!

Researchers who were engaged in one of the most extensive water quality and pollution studies on the reef have concluded that seaweed is taking a toll on the $1 Billion a year tourist attraction.

Due to run off in the area, the water quality on the reef is extremely poor. The study discovered the level of nutrients and high turbidity of the water was increasing the occurrence of seaweed and decreasing the biodiversity of corals on the reef.

The areas which seem to be the most effected are the inshore reef to the north of the Burdekin River and the whole of the Wet Tropics zone from Port Douglas to Townsville.

“Seaweeds are a natural part of the reef,” said Dr. Katharina Fabricius, an Australian Institute of Marine Science coral reef ecologist. “But what we don’t want is billions of algae smothering coral.”

“Choking is a loaded term but when seaweed abundance becomes too high there is no space left for coral to grow.”

This study and its results were recently published in the scientific journal Ecological Applications. The data published included data collected from 150 reefs and over 2000 water quality stations located across the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park since the early 1990’s.

Dr. Glenn Death, the principal investigator has said that the seaweed is now covering five times the coral under these poor water conditions.

“The diversity of corals was also affected, decreasing in poor water quality,” he explained.

“Currently, the water on 22 per cent of reefs – about 647 reefs – on the Great Barrier Reef does not meet water quality guidelines.”

The conclusion that the study eludes to is that if the quality of the water was improved in the problem areas, then the seaweed would diminish to one third of what it is now, and the coral species would exhibit a 13 percent increase.

The area that the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park covers is approximately 345,000 square kilometers and extends itself for 2,000 kilometers along the northeast coast of Australia.

The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has announced their plans to create a cryobank for corals. Corals will be collected from tropical areas and placed in liquid nitrogen at the Whipsnade zoo in Bedfordshire.

“Carbon dioxide emissions are rising fast and are already above the safe level for corals,” said Dr Alex Rogers, head of marine biodiversity at the ZSL. “Some reefs are already beginning to fail and many will die within a few decades. We need a plan B, and freezing them is the best option.”

The idea of creating a coral cryobank stems from similar projects concerning seeds, such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault where seeds from all over the world are preserved inside a cool cavern on Spitsbergen, north of mainland Norway.

Storing coral for prolonged periods of time without killing them was made possible quite recently thanks to a new method developed by researcher Craig Downs of the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory.

“We can take 1mm-2mm biopsies from coral, freeze them at -200C and thaw them out to regenerate back into a polyp,” says Downs, who is now working with the ZSL. “We are proposing to do this for every species of coral on the planet.”

Roughly 3,350 cold-water corals and about 1,800 tropical coral species are currently know to science. Downs proposes keeping 1,000 samples of each at the zoo.

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington is now discussing setting up their own coral sample facility to alleviate the risks of having just one coral sample storage in the world.

Charlie Veron, former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, said he supported the efforts but warned it was no consolation for the eradication of reefs. According to Veron, endeavours such as cryobanks, genetic make-up preservation, and coral aquariums aren’t meaningful.

“These are not solutions,” says Veron. “Because Australia is home to the biggest coral reef in the world, it should concentrate all its efforts into helping the Great Barrier Reef survive. Personally, I feel it’s no compensation to know that the genetic information of corals is kept in machines.”

In 1998, the gobies vanished from a section of the Great Barrier Reef as the corals became bleached. The corals have now re-colonized the bleached areas, which are located just of Orpheus Island, but the gobies haven’t returned. This lack of goby fish is puzzling Australian researchers, who had assumed that the gobies would return as soon as the corals bounced back.

Professor David Bellwood from James Cook University says the goby’s failure to repopulate the coral is disturbing, and that it may be an indicator that fish will not return to damaged reefs as fast as first thought.

“What’s happening is they’re not bouncing back, they’re not coming back as fast as we’d expect”, says Bellwood. “These gobies only live for a few weeks – you’d expect them to be turning over very, very fast and they become like an indicator of how the future might be. The reef may never be the same ever again – it’s going to be different, we may have a reef but it’s not going to be like the one we remember and it’s more variable and more unpredictable than we thought.”

The Australian government will spend 200 million AUD to improve the water quality around the Great Barrier Reef in what Agriculture Minister Tony Burke calls a “once-in-a-lifetime chance to resuscitate the reef”.

The first “downpayment”, consisting of 50 million AUD, was committed on Thursday. The money will be divided between agriculture industry groups, natural resource management bodies, and the WWF (World Wide Fund). The recipients will work to increase the water quality by promoting better farming practices on land. The short-term goal is to reduce nutrient and chemical discharge into the reef environment by 25 percent from next year.

“Farmers hold one of the keys to the reef’s long-term health – they understand the land and how to manage it in a smart, productive way,” Burke said in a statement.

A study proposing a ban on spear guns and gill nets in the Great Barrier Reef is now being criticised by Australian scientists saying its results – which were obtained from Kenya and Papua New Guinea – aren’t relevant to the Great Barrier Reef.

The study, carried out by an international team of scientists led by Dr Josh Cinner from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, proposed a ban on fishing gear such as spear guns, fish traps, beach seine nets, and gill nets to aid damaged reefs in their recovery. According to data obtained from the waters of Kenya and Papua New Guinea, certain types of fishing gear are more damaging to corals and to certain species of fish needed to help reefs recover from bleaching or storm damage.

“They [corals and certain types of reef fish] are already on the edge because of the overfishing and the additional impact caused by a bleaching even can push them over,” said Dr Cinner, who is based at James Cook University.

According to Dr Josh, spear guns are the most damaging of all fishing gear, particularly to fish that help maintaining the reef by removing seaweeds and sea urchins.

“Spear guns target a high proportion of species that help maintain the resilience of coral reefs, but also can result in a surprising amount of damage to the corals themselves,” Dr Cinner said. “When a fish is shot with a spear gun, it often hides in the reef, so some fishermen break the corals in their attempts to get it.”

Not applicable to the Great Barrier Reef, says other scientists Fellow JCU fisheries scientist Dr Andrew Tobin do not agree with the fishing gear ban recommendation, saying that the results from the study aren’t applicable to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

“Some of those findings are probably very reasonable for those areas they’ve studied, but to make any link to Great Barrier Reef waters is probably drawing a very long sword,” Dr Tobin said.

According to Townsville marine biologist Dr Walter Starck, who provides advice to Sunfish North  Queensland, herbivore fish aren’t being overfished in the Great Barrier Reef area.

“Here in Australia, it is completely irrelevant,” he said.

The juvenile Hawksbill turtle found near-dead 8 months ago with a plastic shopping bag lodged inside her belly has made a remarkable recovery and has now been released back into the ocean. The Hawksbill turtle is listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of ThreatenSped ecies, so each specimen that can be rescued is important for the population.

Eight months ago the young female, who has been dubbed Alva by her caregivers, was found halfway up the beach, upside down, with her head buried in the sand, slowly dying in the sun. She was rushed to Townsville’s Reef HQ turtle hospital where x-rays revealed that a large piece of plastic stuck inside her had caused a severe gut blockage.

In addition to receiving treatment for the blockage, Alva was bathed, scrubbed and hand-fed by the turtle hospital staff who gradually nursed her back to life from the near-death experience.

“We brought it back from brink of death”, said Reef HQ aquarium acting director Fred Nucifora. “That is the miracle.”

On May 21, Alva was deemed healthy enough to return to the sea and was released into the water in the Australian Great Barrier Reef Region.

“It was emotional to say goodbye,” said Nucifora. “We’d like to think Alva turned back and gave us a heartfelt look, but it was barely a glance and, with a flick of the flipper, she was off.”

Good news from Queensland: Certain reefs in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park seem to have undergone a remarkable recovery since the devastating Keppel Islands coral bleaching event of 2006.

In 2006, massive and severe coral bleaching occurred around the Keppel Islands due to high sea temperatures. After being bleached, the reefs rapidly became overgrown with a species of seaweed and scientists feared this would be the end of the corals.

Picture is not from Keppel Island. It is another part of the Great barrier reef

Earlier studies have indicated that reefs that do manage to recover from catastrophes like this one need at least a decade or two to bounce back. However, a lucky combination of three previously underestimated ecological mechanisms now seems to have made it possible for the Keppel Islands reefs to make an amazing recovery, with large numbers of corals re-establishing themselves within a single year.

“Three factors were critical,” says Dr Guillermo Diaz-Pulido, from the Centre for Marine Studies at The University of Queensland and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS). “The first was exceptionally high regrowth of fragments of surviving coral tissue. The second was an unusual seasonal dieback in the seaweeds, and the third was the presence of a highly competitive coral species, which was able to outgrow the seaweed.“

Dr Diaz-Pulido also stresses that the astonishing recovery took place in a well-protected marine area where the water quality is at least moderately good.

Surviving tissue, not sexual reproduction

“The exceptional aspect was that corals recovered by rapidly regrowing from surviving tissue,” explains Dr Sophie Dove, also from CoECRS and The University of Queensland. “Recovery of corals is usually thought to depend on sexual reproduction and the settlement and growth of new corals arriving from other reefs. This study demonstrates that for fast-growing coral species asexual reproduction is a vital component of reef resilience.”

Buying time

According to Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, also of the CoECRS and The University of Queensland, understanding the different mechanisms of resilience will be critical for reef management under climate change. “Clearly, we need to urgently deal with the problem of rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but managing reefs to reduce the impact of local factors can buy important time while we do this. Our study suggests that managing local stresses that affect reefs, such as overfishing and declining water quality, can have a big influence on the trajectory of reefs under rapid global change.”

Dr Laurence McCook from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority agrees. “As climate change and other human impacts intensify, we need to do everything we possibly can to protect the resilience of coral reefs. This combination of circumstances provided a lucky escape for the coral reefs in Keppel Islands, but is also a clear warning for the Great Barrier Reef.“

You can find out more about the remarkable recovery in the paper “Doom and boom on a resilient reef: Climate change, algal overgrowth and coral recovery”, published in the journal PLoS ONE, by Guillermo Diaz-Pulido, Laurence J. McCook, Sophie Dove, Ray Berkelmans, George Roff, David I. Kline, Scarla Weeks, Richard D. Evans, David H. Williamson and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.

According to University of Queensland marine biologist Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, recipient of the prestigious Eureka science prize in 1999 for his work on coral bleaching, sea temperatures are likely to rise 2 degrees C over the next three decades due to climate change and such an increase will cause Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to die.

Hoegh-Guldberg’s statement is now being criticized by other scientists for being overly pessimistic, since it does not consider the adaptive capabilities of coral reefs. According to Andrew Baird, principal research fellow at the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, there are serious knowledge gaps when it comes to predicting how rising sea temperatures would affect the coral.

Great barrier reef

“Ove is very dismissive of coral’s ability to adapt, to respond in an evolutionary manner to climate change,” says Dr Baird. “I believe coral has an underappreciated capacity to evolve. It’s one of the biological laws that, wherever you look, organisms have adapted to radical changes.”

According to Dr Baird, climate change would result in major alterations of the reef, but not necessarily death since the adaptive qualities of coral reefs would mitigate the effects of an increased water temperature. “There will be sweeping changes in the relative abundance of species,” he says. “There’ll be changes in what species occur where. But wholesale destruction of reefs? I think that’s overly pessimistic.”

Marine scientist Dr Russell Reichelt, chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, agrees with Dr Baird. “I think that he’s right,” says Dr Reichelt. “The reef is more adaptable and research is coming out now to show adaptation is possible for the reef.”

Professor Hoegh-Guldberg responds to the criticism by saying that the view “that reefs somehow have some magical adaptation ability” is unfounded. He also raises the question of how big of a risk we are willing to take. “The other thing is, are we willing to take the risk, given we’ve got a more than 50 per cent likelihood that these scenarios are going to come up?” professor Hoegh-Guldberg asks.”If I asked (my colleagues) to get into my car and I told them it was more than 50 per cent likely to crash, I don’t think they’d be very sensible getting in it.“

Google is now adding marine parks to their maps, starting with the famous Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. It is now possible to use Google Maps to see islands, reefs, cays and even rocks on the reef, but the future of the map function might be even more exiting since Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority chairman Russel Reichelt has expressed hopes of having current still images of the reef streamed to the map in real time in the near future.