#Sea Women of Melanesia

[coochiequeens]

June 8 is World Oceans Day

so here are some articles about women I taking care of our oceans

https://today.ucsd.edu/story/scripps-led-fellowship-program-promotes-equal-access-for-students-interested-in-scientific-diving

“In an effort to make the diving community a more inclusive and diverse space, Scripps PhD candidate Erica Ferrer and then-PhD candidate Alyssa Griffin (now Assistant Professor at UC Davis) launched the SCUBA DIVERsity Fellowship Program at Scripps in the fall of 2022. They have worked alongside Scripps Director of Diversity Initiatives Keiara Auzenne and Scripps Dive Safety Officer Christian McDonald to create this fellowship program that provides undergraduate and graduate students with scientific diver training, access to gear, and even swimming proficiency lessons for those who have limited experience in the water.”

#June 8 #world oceans day #Women in Science #Sonya Legg #center of Ocean Leadership #great barrier reef #Sea Women of the Great Barrier Reef #Australian First Nations women in marine conservation #Sea Women of Melanesia #Catherine Cat O’Keefe #New England Fisheries Management Council #Guyana

[troythecatfish]

Here’s my personal recommendation of people to support:

#ocean #ocean life #ocean lover #charity #donate if you can #please donate #donate #pls donate #donate now #sea #coral reef #coral #make a difference #make a change #tumblr recommendations #recommend #recommendation #great barrier reef #the Great Barrier Reef #spreading awareness #sea lover #sea life #environmetalists #environmentallyfriendly #environmental justice #environmental protection #environmentalists #environmental activism #environmental awareness #environmentalism

[nishadesigns]

Sea Women of Melanesia: Female divers push to save endangered coral reefs in South Pacific — Life & Soul Magazine

Sea Women of Melanesia: Female divers push to save endangered coral reefs in South Pacific — Life & Soul Magazine

Sea Women of Melanesia is teaching local women scuba diving and biology skills so they can monitor the health of coral reefs and create and restore marine protected areas that surround a group of island nations in the South Pacific. The Sea Women work in what’s known as the Coral Triangle, which covers some 5.7 […]Sea Women of Melanesia: Female divers push to save endangered coral reefs in South…

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#ART #Artists #colors #endangered coral reefs #female divers #hospitality design #hotel design #interiordesign #interiordesigners #life and soul magazine #melanesia #Nisha Designs #residential design #sea women

[fatehbaz]

Western nuclear testing in the Pacific, and in particular the French programme, which stretched across three decades (1966–96), has generated protest movements and literatures that – in keeping with Hauʻofa’s model – transcend imposed colonial divisions in the Pacific by fostering regional solidarity. [...]

Gorodé is a significant figure to consider within this context of transoceanic anti-nuclear protest, as like many Indigenous Pacific women she has been closely involved in the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement. She was also one of the founders of Groupe 1878 (a Kanak independence movement named after a 19th-century Indigenous uprising against French colonial rule), and when she was jailed in Camp-Est prison (in Noumea) for “disturbing the peace” during a 1974 sit-in at local law courts, she wrote two anti-nuclear poems: “Clapotis” (“Wave Song”) and “Zone Interdite” (“Forbidden Zone”). As the title of “Clapotis” (which could be translated more literally as “the lapping of water”) suggests, imagery of the sea is central to the poem, which begins by contrasting the sere, inhospitable environment of the prison exercise yard with the plentitude and dynamism of the sea beyond the prison walls.

Anticipating Hauʻofa’s model of an interconnected Oceania, Gorodé posits the movement of the waves as conveying ripples of protest from Oceania’s easternmost island, Rapanui, against the violence of the Chilean political regime that holds jurisdiction over “Easter Island”, and subsequently bearing witness to the nuclear violence “infecting the sky” over Moruroa. The wave also holds the potential to “carry” Indigenous Pacific peoples forward in their resistance to imperialism, gathering and imparting radical energies through its transoceanic trajectories [...].

Thus the poem establishes what Édouard Glissant terms a “poetics of relation”, a referential system that, rather than remaining rooted in individual national contexts, engages in a horizontal, transoceanic dialogue with other cultures, languages and value systems in its critique of colonialism (Glissant 1997, 44–46). Glissant’s theory (which takes the Caribbean as its main point of reference) is comparable to Hauʻofa’s in positing the sea as a basis for elaborating a regional, interpelagic identity, and as Elizabeth DeLoughrey has noted, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics (another Caribbean theoretical model) is also a productive paradigm for analysing the “cyclic” ebb and flow of the Pacific, and of the diasporic populations that have moved across and within it [...].

Notably, Gorodé’s “Wave Song” extends its poetics of relation not just to francophone and hispanophone cultures elsewhere in Oceania, but also to the internal politics of Chile in the 1970s, making reference to the deposing of Salvador Allende’s [...] government and the torture and murder of left-wing activists [...]. Chile’s internecine violence, enacted on its own nationals, is shown to be redolent of its colonial conquest of Easter Island/Rapa Nui, and resonates, in a tidalectic pattern of ebb and flow, with the waves of French colonial violence rippling out from New Caledonia, via French Polynesia, towards the easternmost point of Oceania and back again.

-------

In an effort to transcend these [colonial, Euro-American-imposed] divisions, in the 1990s Hauʻofa produced a series of influential essays advocating a new regional “Oceanic” politico-ideological identity that would not only help unite and protect Pacific Islanders against the vicissitudes of global capitalism and climate change (a significant consideration given that Pacific Islanders are among the earliest casualties of rising sea levels, as well as suffering the long-term effects of nuclear imperialism), but could also serve as a source of inspiration to contemporary Pacific artists and creative writers (see Hauʻofa 2008). Hauʻofa’s model acknowledges the complex and interweaving local, regional and global networks that shape the lives of contemporary Pacific peoples [...].

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When Algeria gained its independence from France in 1962, France was forced to end its nuclear testing programme in what is now the Algerian Sahara, and chose French Polynesia as its new testing site, establishing facilities on two atolls in the Tuamotu Island group: Fangataufa and Moruroa [...]. As knowledge of the adverse impact of French nuclear testing became more widely publicized in the 1970s, increasing numbers of newly independent Pacific island nations (as well as settler and Indigenous communities in Australia and New Zealand) expressed vigorous opposition to the tests. [...] [I]n the ensuing years the movement intersected with other campaigns against large-scale military manoeuvres, the testing of intercontinental ballistic missiles at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, test bombing at Kahoʻolawe Island in Hawaiʻi, the mining of uranium in Australia, and the dumping of radioactive waste in the Pacific by Japan [...].

While such events created severe schisms between the nuclear powers and white settler nations [”New Zealand”] in the Pacific, they also prompted Indigenous Pacific peoples to unite against the nuclear desecration of their homelands, triggering affiliations that transcended the geopolitical and linguistic divides that often hamper creative dialogue between, for example, anglophone and francophone [...] writers. (This has particular significance given that it was the French explorer Dumont d’Urville who devised the tripartite geocultural division between Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia that still operates to this day [see Dumont D’Urville 1832].)

Maori artist Ralph Hotere, for example, made a significant gesture of solidarity with French Polynesians in his “Black Rainbow” series of lithographs and paintings produced in 1986, lamenting not just the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, but also the French nuclear testing programme that continued in the wake of the attack. Hotere’s work inspired Samoan author Albert Wendt (1992) to write a dystopian novel, also entitled Black Rainbow, which establishes a homology between nuclear testing and other forms of environmental degradation and exploitation as a result of European incursion into the Pacific [...].

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Michelle Keown. “Waves of destruction: Nuclear imperialism and anti-nuclear protest in the indigenous literatures of the Pacific.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing. February 2019.

[my-name-is-dahlia]

Vocabulary (pt.dcccxxix)

Words taken from the AMA Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors, 10th edition, by the editors of JAMA and the Archives journals (Oxford University Press, 2007):

Hippocrates  (c.460–377 BC), Greek physician, commonly regarded as the father of modern medicine. He regarded the body as a single organism, and formulated a theory of disease.

expedite (v.) assist the progress of; hasten (an action, process, etc.). 

midwife (n.) a person (usually a woman) trained to assist women in childbirth.

fellowship (n.) championship or friendly association with others.

clamshell (n.) the shell of a clam.

adultism (n.) the power adults have over children.

race (n.) each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics.

Caucasus a mountainous region of southeast Europe, lying between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and southeast Russia.

pacific islands island geographic region of the Pacific Ocean. It comprises three ethnogeographic groupings—Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia—but conventionally excludes the neighbouring island continent of Australia, the Asia-related Indonesian, Philippine, and Japanese archipelagoes, and the Ryukyu, Bonin, Volcano, and Kuril island arcs that project seaward from Japan. [x]

Kwanzaa (n.) a festival observed from 26 December to 1 January in celebration of black cultural heritage.

#av #avdictionary #vocabulary list #AMA Manual of Style #ama

[don-lichterman]

Ocean Clean up a success

Ocean Clean up a success

More than 110 people participated in the clean-up, including the community, and students and staff from Daugo Primary School. They were joined by officers from NFA, the National Maritime Safety Authority (NMSA), Water Police, Sea Women of Melanesia (SWoM), Conservation and Environment Protection Authority (CEPA), and members of the Royal Papua Youth Club (RPYC).   The official beach clean-up…

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#Daugo Village #Ocean Clean up

[news-venue]

United Nations names Sir David Attenborough Champion of the Earth

Sir David Attenborough has been named a UN Champion of the Earth in recognition of the environmentalist's commitment to sharing stories about the natural world and climate change.

He has played a key role in bringing the dangers facing the natural world into people’s homes and encouraging action.

Sir David said more is needed to prevent further destruction of the planet but there is hope.

“Fifty years ago, whales were on the very edge of extinction worldwide. Then people got together and now there are more whales in the sea than any living human being has ever seen,” the 95-year-old said.

“We know what the problems are and we know how to solve them. All we lack is unified action.”

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) honoured Sir David with a Champions of the Earth Lifetime Achievement Award for his dedication to research, documentation, and advocacy for the protection of nature and its restoration.

Sir David’s career as a broadcaster, natural historian, author and environmental advocate covers more than seven decades.

He is most famous for his work with the BBC’s Natural History Unit, including documentaries such as Life on Earth, The Living Planet, Our Planet and Our Blue Planet.

“The world has to get together. These problems cannot be solved by one nation — no matter how big that single nation is. We know what the problems are and we know how to solve them. All we lack is unified action,” he said.

UNEP executive director Inger Anderson paid tribute to Sir David, saying: “If we stand a chance of averting climate and biodiversity breakdowns and cleaning up polluted ecosystems, it's because millions of us fell in love with the planet that he captured on film and writing, in his voice.”

Previous recipients of the award include Barbados Prime Minister Mia Motley and charity Sea Women of Melanesia.

Before last year's Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, Sir David called for “bold action” and support for local communities and landowners so they can create connected wild places on land and at sea to protect humanity.

At an event last week for the Earthshot Prize, Britain's Prince William said Sir David's documentaries were an inspiration.

Sir David showed there was a “wider world out there to explore”.

“And I think my grandfather, my father, both kind of having a deep passion and interest in this area for many years, has sort of piqued my interest and my curiosity," he said.

“So growing up, I was surrounded by kind of this adventure and this idea of exploring and being out in the garden. I used to spend hours climbing trees, digging ditches and all sorts of things — hiding in dens and all sorts round the garden.

“So I used to love being out in the sort of wild and the wet.”

#Sir David Attenborough #EARTH

[diveplanit]

Sea Women of Melanesia: Empowering PNG women to be reef guardians

The Coral Sea Foundation has taken its Sea Women of Melanesia program up a notch with a couple of intensive training programs, the first, held in PNG’s Conflict Islands, providing 17 indigenous women with the skills to protect their surrounding marine environment.

The intensive two-week course, developed in partnership with Conflict Islands Conservation Initiative (CICI) in PNG, and Dive Munda in the Solomon Islands, includes training in conservation theory, scuba diving and marine biology survey techniques so they have the skills to communicate the need for marine reserves to their local communities & are able to identify areas suitable for marine protected areas for future conservation.

The Sea Women of Melanesia out reef surveying in the Conflict Islands

The first intensive course held in the Conflict Islands Resort wrapped up recently. Over a two-week period, the Sea Women of Melanesia program empowered 17 local PNG women to be custodians of their local reefs, in their traditionally matrilineal societies.

The course taught them how to identify areas that need protection, how to work closely within their communities and neighbouring communities to establish ways to protect their reefs and help sustain their traditional livelihood, assisting traditional resource owners for many years to come.

Milne Bay Province is the biggest maritime province of PNG, a diverse area of small island groups spread over a wide expanse. The income of the islands is low, with most island communities relying on the marine environment to survive.

Fishing for the village is commonplace, but it’s the illegal side of fishing that is causing problems. With the growing needs of a developing modern society in PNG, some fishermen have resorted to unsustainable practices, including shark finning and turtle poaching, affecting all aspects of this delicate coral reef ecosystem.

Conservation International’s ecological report found that the reefs around Milne Bay held an identified total of 418 Scleractinia coral species, which is more than half the world’s species, seven of which are newly identified species. The protection of Milne Bay’s coral reefs through the establishment of Locally Managed Marine LMMA’s will ensure that there is abundant fish life for the villages to survive on in the future.

General Manager Hayley Versace says engaging the surrounding island communities is a step in the right direction.

“I only want the best for our neighbouring island communities. They are so kind and generous even when they have nothing. It seems they have been abandoned by the government of the day and the rest of the world with global climate change and access to reliable resources becoming increasingly harder. Running these programs will give the communities the tools to manage the oceans’ natural resources for the future. This will be for the betterment of our neighbors and surrounding oceans. The ocean has given me so much over my lifetime, it is time I start giving something back.”

A Coral Sea Foundation volunteer checking the coral

Through the course, the women learnt how to identify areas that need protection, how to work within their communities and neighboring communities, and to become advocates for marine conservation. These tools and skills acquired are a combination of science, ecotourism, and sustainability, which in turn will help them develop marine reserves that will enhance fisheries and ecotourism resources while improving the basic quality of people in the far-flung rural areas.

While a bit nervous to start with, the 17 enthusiastic Melanesian women had amazing support from the PADI Dive Instructors, and soon took to the water like they belonged there. PADI generously donated 50% off all training materials for the participants, hats and t-shirts for the women.

A few participants had never seen the wonders below the surface and others had deep water phobia, nonetheless, as soon as they got comfortable there was no stopping them.

Bathsheba “Benita” Gaunedi from Deboyne Group of Islands shares her experience.

“I never considered the underwater world to be this beautiful. Growing up, my life literally was surrounded by the sea- it was where we washed our cooking and eating utensils; washed our clothes and importantly it was our garden.”

Around here the sea is the highway, the only way island communities can get to other places and access resources like hospitals, it also produces all the communities’ resources.



“We cared less about the health of the corals, the reefs and all that lived in the sea. But then came a time when seashells were hard to find, fishermen returned with small fish or no catch at all and then illegal deals were struck by greedy individuals with outsiders for bech de mer (sea cucumbers) and shark fins.

“I was glad to attend this program because being a woman in my culture leaves me no choice but to follow rules and decisions set by elders of my community who are all men. This opportunity will give me the power to make the change I have always wanted to do.”

Bathsheba enjoyed the two weeks; day-in-day-out. This young mother is determined that all that she achieved and learnt from the SWoM program will not go to waste.

“With this training, I am confident that I will now be able to take back what I have learned and implement in my Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) that my island community has set aside. Importantly, I am now able to dive underwater with confidence to monitor marine life.”

Bathsheba’s story aligns with the other sixteen women’s following this once in a lifetime opportunity.

“I wish to thank all my fellow participants for assisting in one way or another and a big appreciation to my dive-buddy for watching my back in and out of the water and to Terry from Pelagic Dive Travel for

According Coral Sea Foundation CEO Andy Lewis, the SWoM Program was inspired by Lorie Pipiga, a young girl from Fergusson Island, Milne Bay Province, and on the numerous trips that Andy has made to PNG, during which he came to realise that there were more girls than boys studying marine science in PNG universities.

“It was inspiring and moving to see that these women are committed to conservation, however there was lack of additional training. It is now my hope that with support from our partners and sponsors, we can expand the reach of this program in PNG and the Solomon Islands.”

So far so good. From its humble beginnings just two years ago, the Sea Women of Melanesia has grown from just one graduate in 2017, two in 2018 and now in 2019, 17 women have successfully completed the training.

The post Sea Women of Melanesia: Empowering PNG women to be reef guardians appeared first on Diveplanit.

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[issuewire]

Support the Sea Women of Melanesia Program, Papua New Guinea.

#IssueWire | Press Release Distribution #IssueWire | Press Release Distribution https://s3-us-west-

[fatehbaz]

The mapping and naming of Oceania as Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia has been extensively [...] critiqued [...]. In mapping Oceania, Melanesia was the only subregion named after the skin colour of its inhabitants: the ‘black-skinned people’ or ‘black islands’. The names Polynesia and Micronesia describe the geography of the islands. The term Melanesia was deployed to invoke blackness [...]. European images of Oceania were also influenced by the concept of the ‘noble savage’, which glorified a ‘natural life’ that was seen as uncorrupted [...] and therefore represented humans’ innate goodness [...]. The portrayal of Pacific Islanders as noble savages was influenced largely by the accounts of European explorers like J*mes C*ok and Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who had documented their shared encounters with South Seas peoples and places, especially Tahitian and Marquesan peoples and landscapes. [...] Papua New Guinean scholar Regis Tove Stella discussed how race was used in European colonial discourse to describe and represent Papua New Guineans as inferior to Europeans and other Pacific Islanders, party because of their darker skin. [...]

I have often wondered how the view of Pacific Islanders as noble savages would have developed had it been based on European encounters with my ancestors from the Solomon Islands or with those from other parts of Melanesia. Perhaps the descriptor of the savage would have shifted from noble to ignoble.

--------

Scholarly enterprises that developed with European and North American higher education also contributed to the construction and perpetuation of the negative representations of Melanesia. [...]. Epeli Hau’ofa commented on the role of anthr*pology in perpetuating what he called ‘distorted’ images of Melanesia:

After decades of anthropological field research in Melanesia we have come up only with pictures of people who fight, compete, trade, [...] engage in rituals, [...] copulate, and sorcerise each other. There is hardly anything in our literature to indicate whether these people have any such sentiments as love, kindness, consideration, altruism, and so on. We cannot tell from our ethnographic writings whether they have a sense of humour. [...] (2008).

Hau’ofa took issue with the tendency to describe Melanesian polities as underdeveloped and backward compared to ‘advanced’ Polynesia. [...] The descriptions of Melanesian sociopolitical organisations as underdeveloped and backward were also due to Europeans’ inability to relate to and understand the complexities of Melanesian societies. For instance, the Kula Ring in Papua New Guinea entailed complex interactions among peoples from different language groups involving trade, politics, ceremonial exchanges and social relationships that held these societies together and survived for thousands of years [...]. Consequently, the absence of centralised authority and the relative egalitarian nature of societies in the southwestern Pacific and among Indigenous Australians implied social deficiencies [...].

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The negative representation of Melanesians -- and hence the construction of the ignoble savage -- is found not only in academic research and writings but in visual images as well.

I am often troubled by images of Melanesians that are framed and hung on the walls of university buildings. To me they look uncomfortable, trapped in time for the entertainment, curiosity and amusement of those who walk the corridors. When I first went to The Australian National University (ANU), I found that the only picture of bare-breasted women on the walls of the Coombs Building was one of Solomon Islanders [Melanesia]. [...] When I joined the East-West Center in Honolulu, I noticed that the only pictures of half-naked people on the walls of Burns Hall were those of people from Tanna in Vanuatu [Melanesia]. [...] I passed the half-naked Tanna people and then came to pictures of Micronesians who were dressed and represented in studio poses, as though they had been liberated from savagery, unlike the Melanesians at the other end of the hallways.

I often wondered what those people in the pictures might have been thinking as they stared at me from their framed existence. They probably wondered why I was walking along the corridor and not framed and hung on the wall with the rest of them.

Perhaps I am framed in a different way -- still stuck in the racialised map of Oceania constructed by early Europeans and sustained by contemporary discourses.

-------------

Tarcisius Kabutaulaka. “Re-Presenting Melanesia: Ignoble Savages and Melanesian Alter-Natives.” Contemporary Pacific. 2015.

[diveplanit]

New Marine Reserve for PNG

Exciting news from the Coral Sea Foundation, as a new PNG marine reserve is declared in Milne Bay. The Nua Marine Reserve Network in the waters of East Ferguson Island in the Milne Bay Province, is a direct result of the Foundation’s last expedition to PNG, and its ongoing program which mentors Melanesian Women to take care of PNG’s marine environment.

The Coral Sea Foundation’s Dr Andy Lewis shares a few details of their recent expedition which led to this happy conclusion.

“Our voyage was several months in the planning, and after flying into Alotau from Port Moresby, we travelled 100km by sea to Sebutuia Bay of Ferguson Island, which is the home of our trainee Lorie Pipiga and the extended Pipiga Family.

“Our team got straight to work, and over the next nine days we held landowner meetings at Ferguson, Sanaroa and Uama Islands to explain the benefits of the marine reserve concept and invite the local people to participate with the support and assistance of the Coral Sea Foundation. All the community leaders had their chance to speak, and I was overwhelmed at the positive response we got in all the villages.

“Everyone knew the fish catches had been going down over time, and they were keen to support any initiative that would help conserve the resource into the future and provide them with assets they could use to promote ecotourism.”

PNG’s former High Commissioner to Indonesia, Jeffrey Tolo’ube, a Ferguson local, also attended meetings to advocate for a marine reserve.

“There were grown men in tears as they realised they had to work smarter to manage their resources and give their kids a future.”

The meetings concluded with five different landowner groups pledging reef to the new Nua Marine Reserve Network, which was immediately mapped.

“Nua” means Coral in the local Dobu language, and the area chosen for protection at the eastern tip of the Coral Triangle contains some of the most biodiverse coral reef ecosystems in the world.

The team conducted site assessment surveys on all the designated reefs and collected more than one thousand monitoring images which has been compiled and delivered it to the Conservation and Environment Protection Authority of the PNG Government for formal recognition of the Nua Marine Reserve Network as a Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA).

“The jewel in the crown of the reserve network is the Lalai reef on Ferguson Island, which I discovered in 2006 while working on True North, and over the years I have managed to get back to this reef every single year and collect a set of monitoring images while guiding the True North guests over the spectacular coral gardens. It remains one of the most incredible reefs I have ever seen in any of my travels right around the Indo-Pacific, and the day after the meeting I swam for two hours over Lalai absolutely blown away by the condition of the corals and the fact that the landowners had all just agreed to preserve this incredible spot!”

Other reefs in the local area were also surveyed, including Uama and Sanaroa Islands, which revealed fantastic coral communities with amazing potential for snorkelling and diving.

“The whole area has such incredible ecotourism potential, in addition to the coral reefs there are 2km high mountains, lush tropical rainforests complete with waterfalls and endemic birds of paradise, fascinating indigenous cultures, and we even found a wave and a blue lagoon for the surfers and kiters.”

Lewis is hopeful that the Foundation has started the ball rolling in this region and the local people can halt the decline in their fisheries and start to generate sustainable ecotourism income.

“Pressures from Asian logging and commercial fishing companies are a real and present danger to the natural assets of this area, and we have seen only too often the damage they cause in Sebutuia Bay and elsewhere in Melanesia.”

Learn more about the Coral Sea Foundation here, and contribute to the crowd-funding campaign that supports the Nua Marine Reserve Network here, and the ongoing campaign to support the Sea Women of Melanesia here.

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[diveplanit]

Lizard Island’s remarkable coral reef recovery

Diveplanit readers will remember the flurry of media activity following 2016’s Great Barrier Reef bleaching event. Images of bleached white coral on Lizard Island’s fringing reef were shared by media all over the world, many claiming the Great Barrier Reef dead. But a recent expedition led by the Coral Sea Foundation’s Dr Andy Lewis found otherwise.

Dr Lewis has just completed an 18-night expedition to the Northern Great Barrier Reef with students from Victoria’s Geelong College, and shares some great news about coral recovery at Lizard Island, which was heavily impacted by cyclones and bleaching in the 4-year period from 2014-2017.

“The cyclones and bleaching events took a heavy toll on the colourful branching corals from the Family Acroporidae, with almost complete removal of adult colonies around the island after the summer of 2016. However, our field observations in mid-2016 showed that there were certain locations where juvenile Acroporid corals had begun to grow, and our surveys of the Giant Clam populations in Watsons Bay in 2017 showed that hundreds of small corals from more than 20 species had become established at that site, even settling directly on the clam shells in many cases.”

Dr Lewis returned to the island this year and was able to photograph the same corals growing on the Giant Clam shells to get an idea of their growth rate.

“The results were quite astounding, with most colonies doubling or even tripling in size in only 50 weeks.”

During the expedition a series of underwater video surveys were complete on the site, which returned density estimates of almost two juvenile corals per square meter.

“Given the fast growth rates of these corals and their abundance, these figures indicate that the Acroporid coral assemblage at this Clam Gardens site will recover quickly if undisturbed for another couple of years.”

June 2017

July 2018

Not all places around Lizard Island indicated the same speedy recovery signs, but pleasingly, all the sites visited over the course of this year’s expedition showed visible signs of coral recruitment, which were not evident just 12 months ago.

“We were particularly excited to find very high numbers of juvenile corals on the inner edge of North reef, approaching 10-20 corals per square metre, which is the highest density we have seen at Lizard Island so far. The source of these new coral recruits is unknown, as most adult colonies in the Lizard Island area were killed during the bleaching and therefore could not have contributed larvae in recent years, but we do know that Acroporid larvae may stay viable for over a month during their pelagic phase, so it appears that adult corals on other reefs in the GBR have seeded the Lizard Island area.

“At some stage in the future, genetic fingerprinting techniques might be used to pinpoint the location of the parents of these new corals at Lizard Island, but for now we are very grateful that these young corals are growing so well.”

According to Dr Lewis, “While there is no doubt that the reefs of the northern Great Barrier Reef around Lizard Island will need many years of undisturbed conditions to return to a state of high coral cover, there is also no doubt that the fundamental recovery potential of the reef is intact and that the recovery is already underway.”

Understanding the speed and dynamics of that recovery is now a research priority for scientists.

“The Great Barrier Reef has evolved over the last 30 million years in a setting where it is continually recovering from various disturbances (sea-level change, cyclones, crown-of-thorns starfish), and our mission is to understand how that inherent recovery potential copes with the added stresses caused by the recent broad-scale bleaching events.”

“I think it is very important that people understand that the Great Barrier Reef, even in its presently battered state, is still an amazing place to visit, that it is certainly not “dead” or “dying”, and that now more than ever, it deserves our most urgent protection efforts.”

The Coral Sea Foundation team works hard to ensure that information on the status of the reefs they visit is available and clearly explained to both scientific and general audiences. To support the Foundation’s work, which includes the mentoring and training of Sea Women of Melanesia, giving them skills to identify areas suitable for ecotourism and marine reserves, you can donate via their gofundme campaign, or purchase something from the selection of amazing coral imagery Foundation’s Redbubble Store.

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