Lizard Island reduced to ‘football fields of animal skeletons’ after mass bleaching

Unprecedented levels of bleaching have wiped out coral and left “football fields of animal skeletons” at a major research station and reef system in Far North Queensland. See before and after.

After suffering a mass bleaching event in 2024, more than 90 per cent of reefs across Lizard Island were decimated. Photo: Jane Williamson

Unprecedented levels of bleaching have wiped out coral and left “football fields of animal skeletons” at a major research station and reef system in Far North Queensland.

A new study has revealed that after 96 per cent of Lizard Island’s reefs were bleached in 2024, only eight per cent of affected coral survived.

JCU Associate Professor and study co-author Karen Joyce visited the site for the first time in 20 years for the study and said the destruction was confronting.

“As soon as the drone’s started taking photos you could see it straight away … afterwards you’re looking at what looks like a black and white photo, because it is just all dead,” she said.

“It is like a football field covered in animal skeletons. That’s the extent of the area that we were surveying, and that’s the density of what we were looking at. So it’s not just one or two corals across a large reef.

“When you consider that the reef is, or was, large extents of living animals, and then you come back and look at it as being animal skeletons, it is really confronting and it’s very sad.”

Researchers from JCU, Griffith and Macquarie University with assistance from CSIRO and GeoNadir visited northern and southern sections of Lizard Island in March and June in 2024 and took high resolution drone images to quantify surviving coral.

The Great Barrier Reef has sustained numerous mass bleaching events in recent years, including 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and 2024.

High resolution images using drones have revealed the true effect of bleaching from 2024 at Lizard Island. Photo: Rebecca Licciardo.

Coral bleaching occurs when sustained high water temperatures force animals to expel a photosynthetic algae as a stress response that provides most of the coral’s energy.

If temperatures fall and conditions improve, coral can recover but if pushed too far this can kill the animal.

Unlike other bleaching events, most corals around Lizard Island didn’t recover.

Ms Joyce said she was confident the mass mortality wasn’t confined to the one island and hoped these findings cut through a growing indifference to or acceptance of declining reef habitat.

“ We have hundreds of data sets, all across the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait, where we look at the reef habitats and how they’re changing over time as well. There’s a lot of potential for extrapolation with the work that we do,” she said.

“I don’t think that Lizard was the only one hit by this. This is just the one that we have the data for to demonstrate that level of mortality.

“I know people do have a tendency to turn off or don’t understand how that can affect them as individuals, or more importantly, what they can do about it but I think that every single individual has power, particularly with purchasing power. What we do with our money and what products and services we choose to use, how we use transportation to make micro decisions that impact the world around us and natural ecosystems.”

Originally published as Lizard Island reduced to ‘football fields of animal skeletons’ after mass bleaching