Category Archives: Coral

Great Barrier Reef watchers anxiously await evidence of coral bleaching from aerial surveys

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Planes will this week cover areas in the southern half of the reef that escaped earlier bleaching but may have undergone high levels of heat stress

The full impact of coral bleaching across the Great Barrier Reef will become clearer this week as aerial surveys of hundreds of reefs are completed in the bottom two thirds of the world’s biggest reef system.

An aerial survey carried out last week over almost 500 individual reefs between the Torres Strait and Cairns revealed some severe bleaching of corals closer to shore, but almost none on outer reefs.

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Healthy coral sounds lure fish back to abandoned reefs, study finds

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With global heating damaging corals worldwide, experts find potential tool in ‘acoustic enrichment’ to recolonise reefs

Playing sounds of a healthy coral reef can attract fish back to reefs that have become degraded and abandoned, researchers have found.

Global heating together with factors such as pollution are causing widespread damage to coral and harming delicate reef ecosystems.

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Massive pumice ‘raft’ spotted in the Pacific could help replenish Great Barrier Reef

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The 150 sq km field of floating rock was created by an underwater volcanic eruption near Tonga

A giant raft of pumice, which was spotted in the Pacific and is expected to make its way towards Australia, could help the recovery of the Great Barrier Reef from its bleaching episode by restocking millions of tiny marine organisms, including coral.

The pumice raft, which is about 150 sq km, was produced by an underwater volcano near Tonga. It was first reported by Australian couple Michael Hoult and Larissa Brill, who were sailing a catamaran to Fiji, on 16 August.

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Reef wipeout: surfers fight China-linked mega resort in Fiji

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Jona Ratu and his friends wanted to build an eco-lodge in their corner of paradise – then the diggers arrived

It was one of the most surreal days of Jona Ratu’s life. On a May morning in 2018 he strolled down to the palm-fringed beach on a parcel of land he owns on idyllic Malolo island to find a digger parked on the coral reef.

“They just dug, they kept digging, digging, digging,” Ratu remembers.

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Japan’s war on whales isn’t over – the Australian government must keep fighting | Darren Kindleysides

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Australia’s global leadership on whale conservation will be tested as Japanese hunters move to a different hemisphere

Japan’s whaling fleet arrived back at the port of Shimonoseki on the weekend with a barbaric tally of 333 dead whales that are no longer swimming freely in the Southern Ocean.

If the work of the Japanese whalers is anything like last year, more than 100 pregnant females and 50 or so juveniles will have been killed. But from now on, things are different.

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