There has been a lot of press about the greatest job on earth and Caretaker of the Great Barrier Reef. In my mind, a real caretaker of the reef is marine biologist Dr. Selina Ward at University of Queensland.
For the past three years, Dr. Ward has been studying the Great Barrier Reef so she can document the effects of coral bleaching if it hits the reef. She has closely observed 122 corals near the Heron Island Ressearch Station.
By closely monitoring the corals, an understanding of how they normally work is recorded. Dr. Ward said, “. . . we lay down tape between known markers and take photos all the way along.
“From those high-resolution photos you get an enormous amount of information because you can zoom in, look at the species of every coral, look at how much they’ve grown over time, what’s died, what algae’s come in, what’s bleached and what’s recruited.
“The monitoring project is particularly important this year because we may get a bleaching event here so we want to see how that bleaching affects the survival of recruits.”
Coral reefs are affected by climate change. With increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, the ocean absorbs this gas making it more acidic and changing Ph levels.
“It looks like Ph is not going to be good for the early life of corals,” she said.
“As you change the Ph, I’ve been finding quite big differences in the success of fertilisation, in the amount that will settle and in the way that first skeleton develops.
“Essentially you’ve got all these different steps of reproduction and if any one of those steps fails then you’re not going to get them recruiting, so they won’t grow.”
It is from work like Dr. Selina Ward that gives us the knowledge we need to help protect the Great Barrier Reef.