Jo Chandler considers 'The Grave Barrier Reef'

Professor Justin Marshall.

Many of today’s marine scientists blame Jacques Cousteau, who surfaced in their lounge rooms during their formative years, for luring them into the water. Others were hooked by the psychedelic barrage of coral gardens and sea creatures in National Geographic. Through the ’60s and ’70s, the co-evolution of scuba technology, underwater photography and colour television took millions of earthlings on their first beguiling voyage into the deep.

Until then, the submarine world was, for most people, as remote as the just-trodden Moon. For the University of Queensland’s Professor Justin Marshall, however, terrestrial life was never really on the cards. His father was Dr Norman Bertram “Freddy” Marshall, “curator of Her Majesty’s fishes” at the British Museum (Natural History), and his mother, Olga, was a scientific illustrator who captured her husband’s discoveries in ink and watercolour. Young Justin was the marine-science equivalent of an army brat, floating around research bases in the Bahamas and Florida between stints at an Essex house where pickled specimens from the world’s oceans were collected, lifeless and eternal, in jars. “I was a nerdy little bugger,” Marshall recalls, “correcting graduate students at age seven on the Latin names of fish.”

Marshall grew up to become a neuro-ecologist investigating how residents of coral reefs and the deeper ocean perceive their environment. “As arrogant humans we tend to assume we are the pinnacle of evolution; however, certainly in sensory terms, this is far from true,” he explains in his professional profile. He tells me he works with these creatures “because I love them”. And, as it happens, they have much to teach. “The animals I’m working on at the moment are helping us detect cancer, increase data storage on computers and improve satellite design. All coming directly from mantis-shrimp vision.”

Read Jo Chandler’s piece in The Monthly - “GRAVE BARRIER REEF - The coral bleaching signals a defining environmental shift.”