Great Barrier Reef island bouncing back from mass coral bleaching, three years later

Coral cover at a Great Barrier Reef island affected by mass bleaching has risen by as much as 25 per cent in just three years, as a good sign of reef recovery in the Far North. WATCH THE VIDEO.

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FITZROY Island’s coral reef appears to be thriving three years after it was affected by mass coral bleaching.

Reef Check Australia has released results from surveys carried out last month on a fringing reef, about 29km offshore from Cairns, showing coral cover has increased at the island’s Welcome Bay by as much as 25 per cent since the mass bleaching event of 2016.

The volunteer organisation has been surveying the island’s coral reef system every six months. Reef Check’s Great Barrier Reef co-ordinator Nathan Cook said the reef was showing signs of recovery from bleaching.

Corals releasing eggs and sperm into the water in Shark Fin Bay at Fitzroy Island off Cairns. Image: Calypso Productions.

“There’s an improvement in coral cover, which was nice to see,” he said. He believed the survey results reflected the natural resilience of the reef to coral bleaching, following a reasonably cool summer.

“The problem with blanket statements like ‘the whole Reef is dead’, is that the Reef is a very large system, and there’s lots of spatial variability both inshore and offshore,” he said.

“For example, I did some surveys offshore from Townsville last month, and some locations have degraded incredibly in recent years from crown-of-thorns starfish and bleaching, down to pristine coverage of live coral in the single digits, whereas other locations nearby were 70-80 per cent coral cover – extremely high.

Reef Check Australia volunteer diver surveying coral at Fitzroy Island

“It just varies too much to say one thing or the other, but the Reef is under a lot of pressure, and climate change is the largest of those stressors.”

In the meantime, massive boulder corals releasing eggs during a spawning event at the island have been captured on video.

Fitzroy Island master reef guide Azri Saparwan said the island’s successful inshore reef coral spawn on October 19 was the first step for the next generation of corals for the Great Barrier Reef.

“This is an exciting precursor to the annual Great Barrier Reef spawn expected to take place on the outer reefs off Cairns on November 16 and 17,” he said.

Originally published as Great Barrier Reef island bouncing back from mass coral bleaching, three years later