Nowadays scientist regularly do the opposite. They strip colour from pretty pictures because they want to make people feel sad, specifically about the corals at the Great Barrier Reef. They are not very nice people. That is the unfortunate truth.
I was back at John Brewer Reef last week and many of the corals are now dark brown. John Brewer reef has lost its pink, for the moment.
I photographed that same coral in July, with my daughter holding a colour chart in front of it. You can see with reference to the university colour chart that the corals that were bleached in March were healthy by July corresponding in colour to a healthy E4.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has uploaded some footage of John Brewer Reef that is part of the Underwater Museum of Art, the footage was apparently taken by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in February. It does not show a lot of bleached coral, but it does show some badly bleached individual…