Rescuing the Great Barrier Reef: how much can be saved, and how can we do it?

When coral scientist Zoe Richards left the Great Barrier Reef’s Lizard Island in late January, she was feeling optimistic.

Zoe Richards has seen great changes in the corals off
Lizard Island since she started monitoring them in 2011.

Richards is a taxonomist. Since 2011 she has recorded and monitored 245 coral species at 14 locations around the island’s research station, about 270km north of Cairns.

In 2017 she saw “mass destruction of the reef”. Back-to-back mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017, and cyclones in 2014 and 2015, had wreaked havoc.

But in January, she saw thousands of new colonies of fast-growing Acropora corals that had “claimed the space” left by dead and degraded corals. In a three-year window without spiralling heat or churning cyclones, some corals were in an adolescent bloom – not mature enough to spawn, but getting close.

Read the story from The Guardian by Graham Readfearn - “Rescuing the Great Barrier Reef: how much can be saved, and how can we do it?”