Corals That Don’t Exist Are Thriving In The Real World

In December 2015 Peter Ridd, then a physics professor at Australia’s James Cook University, contacted a journalist. Researchers affiliated with his own institution, he said, were misleading the public about the Great Barrier Reef.

As an example, Ridd cited photos taken approximately 100 years apart near Bowen, a community of 10,000 on the Australian coast in the vicinity of the Reef. These photos tell a stark story: previously vibrant coral expanses are now desolate wastelands.

Ridd complained that this pair of photos was spreading across the Internet. They were appearing in official reports and news stories.

Even though the 1995 paper in which they’d first been published had cautioned against viewing them as evidence the Reef was in “broad-scale decline,” that’s exactly how they were being used.

Ridd supplied the journalist with recent photos from the same area. These showed healthy, abundant coral.

A few weeks later, matters took another turn. Nature published a paper titled Historical photographs revisited: A case study for dating and characterizing the recent loss of coral cover on the inshore Great Barrier Reef.

The authors said they’d found “very little sign of coral re-establishment” during a visit to Stone Island in 2012, approximately a mile offshore from Bowen. In their words:

At Stone Island, the reef crest was similar to that observed in 1994 with a substrate almost completely devoid of living corals. [bold added by me]

Ridd knew this wasn’t the case. As he’d explained to the journalist:

any decent marine scientist or boat owner around Bowen, could have told you that there is lots of coral…and that it is spectacular. It was always a very unlikely proposition that this area had suddenly lost all its coral. [page 22]

Yet one of the most reputable scientific journals on the planet had just declared otherwise. The real world and the scholarly record were in stark conflict.

So let’s fast forward three-and-a-half years. Late this summer, Australian scientist Jennifer Marohasy enlisted underwater cinematographer Clint Hempsall and coral reef expert Walter Starck. Together, they investigated the waters near Stone Island firsthand.

With the help of a drone and underwater cameras, this team documented extensive coral. Marohasy’s account of the expedition, illustrated with fabulous photos, is here: Found: 25 Hectares of Acropora at Stone Island

Last week, she gave the world a gift, a spectacular 13-minute film below). Her blog post, My First Film: Beige Reef, provides further detail. At the 11:55-minute mark on the video, Marohasy tells us that “Filming these corals, at this reef, is a form of resistance.”

Her purpose, she says, is simple: to acknowledge that these corals exist. To make an accurate record – for today as well as for tomorrow.

Oh, and that Courier-Mail journalist who Peter Ridd had contacted? His name is Peter Michael. Did he help whistleblower Ridd tell the public about those misleading photographs?

Actually, he betrayed him. He forwarded Ridd’s full e-mail to biologist Terry Hughes, Ridd’s professional rival at James Cook. Which immediately set in motion a chain of events that led to Ridd being fired.

That’s the world we live in, folks.

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