‘Putting a lot of strain on the reef’: Inside project to save Great Barrier Reef
Hanging coral gardens and webs of “stars” for coral to cling to are just some innovations being used by Great Barrier Reef tourism operators to help protect the reef from climate change.
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It’s quiet now, the tourists who flocked to this pontoon for a day exploring the Great Barrier Reef are returning to Cairns, and the scientists are returning to the water.
They zip their wetsuits, rig their scuba gear, swim beyond where the tourists go, and dive into a wonderland driven by nature but lent a helping hand by man.
It only takes a second to realise things look different here, about 4m down in a small section of Moore Reef, about 45km off Cairns.
A web of hexagonal, limestone-coated steel structures, known as reef stars, cover the rubbly seabed.
Attached to the interlocked reef stars are bits of coral that the scientists found lying about, picked up and secured with cable ties.
Look closer, and you can see that these “fragments of opportunity” have started to grow around the cable ties and calcify onto the frames. That growth, that life, has happened in just six weeks.
Justin Bovery-Spencer, 30, the senior marine biologist with GBR Biology, leads the way to another zone within this 30m by 20m experimental block, where the same process was done six and 12 months ago.
Now those coral fragments are becoming a colony. Rather than a single small piece of coral, they’re multi-armed branching corals or an obvious plate coral.
They stretch out, taking over more area of the reef stars, although the man-made structure is still visible. There’s more fish action here, too, with a flurry of damselfish catching my eye.
We swim on, to where it all began. A little over two years ago, the team of scientists from GBR Biology, Mars Sustainable Solutions and James Cook University, along with Gunggandji and Yirrganydji Indigenous rangers, put the first reef stars in Australian waters.
Today, that area is alive with coral and speckled with pops of purple and blue, almost as impressive as the healthy outer reef wall closer to the pontoon that tourists enjoy. Only on close inspection can you see the odd sliver of reef star peeking out.
As Bovery-Spencer, says: “If you’re just swimming by, you wouldn’t notice the stars are there; all you see are the corals, pieces that start off as 10cm are now 30, 40, 50cm-tall corals that have grown over the stars. You’ve got huge branching corals sticking up and plate corals getting big widths, heaps of varieties of staghorn, different species, different colours. And there’s more fish and more types of fish.”
This reef restoration work at the site of Reef Magic Cruises’ pontoon is one of a range of projects being facilitated by tourist operators, in conjunction with marine scientists and Indigenous rangers, to improve the resilience of the reef. It’s small and targeted, and proving successful – 97 per cent of coral fragments attached to the reef stars survive.
For generations, the abiding rule was that nature should do its own work, that “hands on” intervention by man was not desirable. It’s a good base rule, says Bovery-Spencer, but there are exceptions. “Times have changed,” he says. And that change is climate change.
The threat to the reef by climate change – through increased cyclonic activity, coral bleaching and the proliferation of crown-of-thorn starfish – led to a summit in 2017 which altered the way the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority allows management of the reef.
Tourist operators, who have millions tied up in boats and pontoons and a unique understanding of their patch, lobbied hard to get involved.
Local tourist operators can’t reduce emissions globally, the key to stemming climate change.
But what they can do, says Bovery-Spencer, whose employer GBR Biology is an offshoot of Reef Magic’s parent company, Experience Co, is help make the reef ecosystem hardier at high-value reefs, which tend to be where operators have permits.
“Moore Reef is a big source reef, so a lot of the fish life that you find around nearby reefs actually come from here.
“If we can boost the coral habitat, the breeding grounds, we can increase the supply of all those fish that can then move out to nearby reefs. And when our reefs spawn, they’ll send out spawn to other reefs.
“By protecting these high-value reefs, you’re having a much larger impact on the overall area.”
GIVING NATURE A HAND
Eric Fisher is relaxing on the deck of the three-storey Reef Magic pontoon he helped design after spending the morning diving the reef, counting fish.
The biology manager for GBR Biology has been studying this reef for almost 20 years, collecting data and a wealth of knowledge about what makes Moore Reef tick.
It’s a passion ingrained since childhood.
“I grew up straight through there,” says Fisher, 52, pointing west towards the mountain range that boasts Queensland’s highest peaks – Mt Bartle Frere and Mt Bellenden Kerr.
“There are two rivers, Mulgrave and Russell, that come down and form a little inlet with a strip of land called Russell Heads. You could only get there by boat so I spent a lot of time running around mangroves and creeks, just observing nature.”
Of all the natural phenomena he’s witnessed at Reef Magic’s Moore Reef zone, Cyclone Yasi in 2011 was the most damaging – 65 per cent of coral was lost. That was followed in 2017 by a bleaching event that destroyed 50 per cent.
“Having that happen within basically a five-year period is what climate change’s impact is; making these disturbances more frequent and more intense,” Fisher says. “That’s putting a lot of strain on the reef.”
Natural recovery does occur. The large outer reef wall near this pontoon was reduced to 15 per cent coral coverage after Yasi. It’s now back to about 90 per cent and a vibrant ecosystem, giving tourists a magnificent example of a healthy reef to explore.
Yet other reefs nearby are sluggish. Some rubble patches were made larger by Yasi, with broken coral being deposited on them. That’s where the reef stars came in.
“I’d been looking for a site stewardship technique to stabilise coral rubble for a few years and I was at a conference in Cairns in 2018, the first Great Barrier Reef Restoration Symposium,” Fisher says.
“At that same conference, I saw a gentleman called Frank Mars talk about reef stars and I was like, ‘Oh, I like that, I need to go and talk to Frank’.”
A couple of days later, Mars was on Moore Reef with Fisher, assessing its suitability for reef star restoration.
The story of how Mars, a descendant of Franklin Mars, the creator of the Mars Bar and chocolate and food empire, came to be working on reef rehabilitation is another example of the nexus between business and environmental sustainability.
It all began with cocoa, says Freda Nicholson, 32, a Mars Sustainable Solutions marine program officer working alongside Fisher and his team on the reef stars project.
She became involved with Mars in 2019 after finishing her masters in marine science at James Cook University and volunteering to work on its first reef star project, on the islands off the Indonesian city of Makassar, South Sulawesi.
“There’s a chocolate factory there,” says Nicholson. “There’s a lot of cocoa farms that Mars gets chocolate from and the families of people that work on the farms and factories rely on fishing.”
Fish stocks were in a dire state. The use of dynamite and cyanide to get fish had damaged coral reefs and depleted fish. “As a holistic thing, some of the guys who were working at the factory thought, ‘Why don’t we look into seeing what we can do?’.”
A range of alternative livelihoods was considered, with abalone farming one option. It involved the use of hexagonal-shaped traps but produced mixed results.
“So, they looked at the structures they were using for abalone farms and thought they’d fit really well together in the shape of a web and asked, ‘Can we use this in some way to restore areas of reef?’.”
The answer was yes, with the hexagonal shapes giving rise to the reef stars. “It works so well because you can use it in odd-shaped areas. You can go around areas of live corals and link back … we’re basically restoring the bits in between that are having trouble restoring on their own because the rubble is not stabilised.”
The Indonesian work has been underway for 10 years and, with the installation of more than 19,000 reef stars and 280,000 coral fragments, has dramatically increased coral cover, fish abundance and biomass.
After Fisher and Experience Co received permits from GBRMPA to trial reef stars at Moore Reef, Nicholson returned to Australia to help guide the project in 2020.
“I’m blown away by how well it’s gone,” she says. “I thought it would go well but I didn’t think it would do as well as it has.”
The team is staying on the pontoon for two nights, taking advantage of a day without a tourist boat arrival, and spending the days diving and monitoring the coral and fish life.
There are three “blocks” being surveyed: two control zones, one with healthy coral, another with poor coral coverage, plus the experimental zone where reef stars have been installed. A total of 439 reef stars and 6200 coral fragments have been attached to this section of Moore Reef, which now boasts a 50 per cent increase in coral cover, as well as more fish of diverse species.
“This project will go for eight years which is part of the permit process,” Fisher says. “They’re a permanent structure so we’ll just keep monitoring to see how it goes; they should become part of the reef.”
All indications are that the project is good for the reef, which makes it good for business. Fisher surveys the 1000sq m pontoon that cost $7m and opened to guests early this year.
“Say we lost every bit of coral out here, we could never move this,” he says.
“We could never get a permit to shift this somewhere else. We’re stuck in this position – we picked this position because it’s a very good reef, really high in biodiversity. From a site stewardship point of view, we’re just helping build its resilience.”
FLOATING GARDENS
On another reef not too far away, John Edmondson and his team are busy doing some underwater gardening.
They collect bits of broken coral and transport them to a hanging garden: a series of mesh structures, similar to security doors, suspended from the sea floor. Then they wedge the fragments into the mesh and let them grow.
When the dive crew on-board Edmondson’s tourist boat, Wavelength, have spare time, they pop back down and start planting.
“They go over to the gardens with a tray and break some fragments off the coral nurseries and plant them out on bare patches on the reef site,” Edmondson, 56, says.
The fragments are held into place by Edmondson’s invention, the Coralclip. It’s a simple stainless steel spring clip hammered into the substrate, holding the fragment in place while the coral attaches to its new home.
What began in 2018 at Wavelength’s main destination, Opal Reef, about 50km off Port Douglas, has blossomed into the Coral Nurture Program, with other tourist operators – Passions of Paradise, Sailaway Port Douglas and Ocean Freedom – creating their own coral nurseries and clipping sites.
So far, about 74,000 pieces of coral have been planted in GBRMPA-approved sites and the result is healthier reefs in prime tourist destinations.
The science of the program – what, when and where to plant, and surveys and monitoring – is the job of University of Technology Sydney scientists. It’s a symbiotic relationship: operators get the benefit of monitoring of their work and researchers get valuable access to the reef by hitching a lift.
Like Fisher and his team, Edmondson says the regulatory move away from a “hands off the reef” approach to allowing tourist operators with intimate knowledge of their site to “become a key player rather than an accessory” is vital.
“The real value is creating genuine, useful tools that the tourism industry can use to maintain their site,” says Edmondson, who says coral bleaching in 2016-17 badly hit Opal Reef.
“Tourism sustainability is really critical to the conservation of the reef because that’s the main way people engage with the reef,” he says.
“By helping keep good sites good, keeping the average coral cover up, people want to keep going to see the reef. If tourists don’t want to come and see it, you wouldn’t have the boat there, you wouldn’t have the crew there, you wouldn’t have the incentive to do it.”
Edmondson says prior to the 2016 bleaching event, the emphasis had been on building resilience in the reef by improving water quality and fisheries management.
“But the big shock was that the worst affected area in the 2016 bleaching was the very far north, from Port Douglas up to the top of the reef, and that’s the area least visited, the least agriculture,” he says.
“Because the area impacted was thought to be the most resilient anyway, the attitude changed: that climate change is such a serious problem that you have to investigate ways to intervene.”
Out of that realisation and the lobbying at the 2017 summit came the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program, the world’s largest collective effort to help an ecosystem adapt to the impacts of climate change.
It’s a multidisciplinary exploration of wider scale interventions, led by the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, Australian Institute of Marine Science, CSIRO, Queensland University of Technology, University of Queensland, James Cook University and Southern Cross University.
The first stage is funded through a $100m chunk of the controversial $444m donation to the GBRF by the Turnbull government in 2018, with another $76m from philanthropy and research groups.
As teams assemble data, IT systems and regulatory frameworks, others among the 300 researchers involved are studying methods such as cooling and shading parts of the reef, rubble stabilisation, coral larval seeding and coral aquaculture.
Projects from a longlist that produce the best results in small-scale trials will be ramped up to larger restoration programs.
But as those projects work their way towards implementation, Edmondson and other operators are glad to be doing something to help their own backyard.
“It was very hard for everybody who worked on the reef during the 2016 bleaching because you could just see it slowly dying and deteriorating,” he says. “We’re very aware what we are doing is small-scale but it’s incredibly satisfying to do.”
The sun is long gone and Tarquin Singleton is sitting on his bunk bed in the small staff quarters on the Reef Magic pontoon after a long day of diving.
It was his first day as GBR Biology’s inaugural Indigenous cultural officer but his connection with the team goes back years; in fact, he says proudly, he was the first person to put a reef star down in Australian waters.
How’d that happen? “I took the opportunity, grabbed it quickly and dived the quickest,” he says, flashing a cheeky grin.
Singleton, 31, grew up on the Gunggandji land of Yarrabah, south of Cairns, and has Yirrganydji, or Cairns, heritage.
He was a Yirrganydji Land and Sea Ranger for seven years, and after getting his scuba diving ticket and helping with crown-of-thorns starfish eradication, he was part of the team that went to Indonesia to learn the reef star technique.
He’s chuffed with the work on Moore Reef. “It’s a method that’s proving itself; it’s great seeing the evidence of what we’re doing.
“It’s a pleasant change from mass coral bleaching. Even though that’s happening, people want to hear what’s being done to preserve and protect rather than everything is failing,” he says. “It might not change the temperatures but it’s something you can do in your backyard and use that as an example to say, ‘Here’s something worth fighting for to drop those emissions’.”
Now he’s part of a new venture, the Reef Cooperative. It’s a three-year plan to rebuild rubble patches using reef stars and to seed coral larvae at Hastings Reef, where other members of the Experience Co fleet operate reef cruises.
The cooperative is a partnership with Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, Yirrganydji and Gunggandji rangers, GBR Biology, Mars Sustainable Solutions and James Cook University, with $2m funding from the Cotton On Foundation.
Singleton’s new employment as a cultural officer with GBR Biology will see him negotiate with Indigenous elders to secure approvals for the work. “Part of my role is going through the protocols and getting permission on paper so we can move to the next step,” he says.
His boss, Fisher, says Indigenous people and marine biologists get on well because both are trained to observe patterns in nature. Local Aboriginal people are integral to GBR Biology’s reef restoration projects.
“They deserve respect, recognition,” says Fisher. “They’ve been here for 60,000 years; they have a lot of knowledge,” he says.
There’s a Dreaming story from the Cairns region that tells of the creation of the Great Barrier Reef, which scientists tell us formed about 10,000 years ago as the sea level rose during the last ice age.
“The story goes,” says Singleton, “that there was a hunter out fishing on the water and he sees something in the water and goes to spear it. But it turned out to be a sacred fish, a fish he wasn’t meant to hit. As it swam off, it stirred up the water,” says Singleton, flapping his hands, “and the water started rising.”
To try to combat the rising waters, the Indigenous people, with help from Dumarri, an ancestral being, heated up boulders and threw them from clifftops into the water. And the Great Barrier Reef was formed.
Now, as another climatic phenomenon threatens the majestic stretch of reef we have come to love, Indigenous people and scientists are working together to help save it.
What the tourist operators are doing in their patch of the reef are only small steps but with climate change forcing a giant leap in the way the reef is managed, a hopeful journey has begun.
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