Reef building hard corals in the order Scleractinia are animals that could be mistaken for plants. One of the most common such corals at the Great Barrier Reef is Acropora hyacinthus. At Myrmidon reef last December, we found ridges replete with these plates in various colours including brown and green. It was in the back lagoon […]
I wasn’t the one who took that bite out of that green plate coral. Can you see what looks like a bite mark? It is at about 4 o’clock on the large, green, plate coral, which is also one of the transect photographs taken last week, on 22nd February at Pixie Reef by Leonard Lim. […]
Join Jo Nova and Dr Jennifer Marohasy, former Director of the Australian Environment Foundation and current Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, as they discuss all things Climate Change: The Facts 2020 – the definitive guide to the latest international research and analysis on climate change science and policy. Together Jo and Dr […]
Knowing the truth has always been a challenge requiring an amount of discipline. And it is getting that much harder in this age of disinformation. How can we distinguish reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda? Science used to be so useful for this. But many government-funded reef research programs now amass data to prove a […]
Late last year, I went on an expedition in search of a type of very old coral known as massive Porites. Stuart, Shaun and I dived five very different coral reefs between Cairns and Townsville. The first was an inshore fringing coral reef to the leeward side of High Island. High Island is close to […]
IPA Senior Fellow Dr Jennifer Marohasy and Dr Peter Ridd joined IPA Members for an IPA Town Hall Talk earlier this month to discuss how the Great Barrier Reef is much healthier than recent media reports say, and to report on their own recent expeditions to the reef. They also talk about the IPA’s book […]
Are walruses the new polar bears – a heartrending icon of the devastation wrought by climate change on the arctic life? The Netflix documentary, Our Planet, would have us believe so. However, evolutionary biologist Dr Susan Crockford reveals how polar bears and walruses are in reality thriving in the Arctic – much against popular belief […]
It is often reported that the Great Barrier Reef is half dead, specifically that the corals are bleached, and the water quality is degraded with pesticides and plastics. If I didn’t know better, I might never want to visit a coral reef, lest I be forced to confront this reality – apparently all our fault. […]
Fundamental to science is measurement. It is a way of objectively assessing something, anything, even the state of a coral reef, even of an individual coral. Historically coral growth rates were measured by coring the really old massive Porites. Like tree rings in temperate forests, the massive old Porites can be cored to see the […]
IPA Senior Fellow Dr Jennifer Marohasy speaks to Alan Jones on Sky News about her new book Climate Change: The Facts 2020.