(VIDEO: Researcher Al Dove collecting a blood sample. Video by Dr Simon Pierce)
DS: What were some of the challenges encountered when doing underwater ultrasounds? How did the team overcome them?
Giant kelp grows in dense stands known as kelp forests. Kelp forests, defined here as habitat-forming brown algae in the orders Laminariales, Fucales, and Desmarestiales, are globally distributed habitats which have declined around the world
The airport expansion is already underway and will be completed within the next few months, so immediate action is required in order to save as many corals as possible.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison unveiled the nearly decade-long conservation package days ahead of a February 1 deadline set by UNESCO to submit a report on the reef's state of conservation, and months after it narrowly avoided being placed on the UN's cultural agency's "danger" list due to the threat of climate change.
“Any additional funding for the environment in Australia is welcome, as it is severely under-resourced. However, handing out cash for the Great Barrier Reef with one hand, while funding the very industry – fossil fuels – that’s driving devastating climate impacts like marine heatwaves and coral bleaching, means they are adding to the very problem they are claiming they want to fix.”
— Climate Councillor, climate scientist and Distinguished Professor of Biology at Macquarie University, Professor Lesley Hughes
Avid diver and professor of computing Dr. Phil Pfeiffer gives an account of how the love of diving, persistence, US$100,000, and a homebrew aerator turned an abandoned quarry in the US state of Tennessee into a thriving dive site for a region that lacked one—and had lost prospective divers for want of a site.
Starting back in 1987, Explorer Ventures put environmental consciousness at the heart of their business model before “sustainability” was an operational buzzword. This strong foundation has helped them navigate the changing tides of the pandemicand follow their customized sustainability management policy called Dive Green.
When Lisa Carne first visited Laughing Bird Caye National Park in 1994, the reef was vibrant and bursting with life, abundant with fish, corals, lobsters, crabs, sponges and sea turtles. After the hurricane, it was a scene of desolation, the seabed a swathe of rubble dotted with a few surviving corals. Hurricane Iris not only killed corals but uprooted their structure, making recovery more difficult.
Equipped with an autonomous hydrophone, the buoy's function is to conduct for the first time real-time acoustic monitoring of the water's cetaceans to assess how oceanic noise pollution affects them.Â
Deployed as part of the Smart Whale Sounds project, it will also track the distribution and behaviour of whale species in real-time and be used to train machine learning models to identify different species' calls.Â
Last December, marine biologist Caitlin Lawson made her way to the Great Barrier Reef.
Like countless others, she was there for the annual spawning of the corals. However, she was armed, not with expensive photographic equipment, but small plastic containers rigged with tubing.
Her mission? To collect the gaseous chemicals released by the corals (as well as their algal and bacterial symbionts)Â before, during and after the spawning event.
Reef-building staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis) was abundant and widespread throughout the Caribbean and Florida until the late 1970s. The fast-growing coral formed dense thickets in forereef, backreef, and patch-reef environments to depths over 20 m.Â
