[Coral-List] what does this new analysis tell us???
Ivan
ivansteward at gmail.com
Wed Feb 9 01:05:53 UTC 2022
Hi Doug/All,
Good post and very thought provoking points. Interesting perspectives.
I'm going to quickly and anecdotally support Doug here regarding
observations in the Indo-Pacific. Call it cherry picking if you like, but
until we can all systematically, accurately and repeatedly monitor across
the entire globe, with as close to replicate efforts spatially and
regarding methods as possible (the replication problem in science having
been well recognized), we still have something of a puzzle in front of us.
It's good to see improvement with standardized efforts over time.
Firstly, you're probably all far more qualified and experienced to comment
than me. It is what it is. I'm not looking to make sweeping determinations
one way or the other. I leave that folly to politicians.
I'm just sharing my recent observations.
I've been doing monitoring work, mainly in PNG, for about 15 years. I go
where projects send me. That's all. No big systematic and well funded
government or academic research programs across endless stretches of coast.
I dive or tow cameras, review footage, make observations and assessments
and try to pick out trends. In PNG I have monitored at one location not far
from Port Moresby for 10 years. Also surveyed at Madang, around the Morobe
Coast near Lae, Woodlark, Lihir and Manus Islands and Milne Bay.
Most recently, in November 2021 I conducted monitoring around Misima
Island, way off the PNG east coast mainland in the Solomon Sea. Has anyone
else been there and done survey work?
What I observed from 14 transects (between 100 and 200m length) along the
southern, northern and eastern coasts (if you'd like I can share the
videos) was that with the exception of fairly localized areas in the
south the reefs are, frankly, in pretty wonderful shape. Water temps around
2 m depth ranged from 28.7 to 29.7 C. pH ranged from 8.16 to 8.26. Pretty
standard stuff for that region. The water was not bubbling, steaming or
caustic, miraculously.
In the south, and only near freshwater outflows that have been affected by
amplified sedimentation from alluvial mining upstream, the reefs have been
demonstrably hammered. It's not the whole coast though, e.g. in one spot
where there's obvious damage, less than 100 m away the reefs look 'pretty
normal'. So, damage is localized and has obvious causation.
Otherwise, there's no widespread bleaching or major disease in sight, or
recent evidence of same (no extensive rubble beyond what is 'normal',
fragments of recent dead skeletons, macroalgal dominance etc). No evidence
of COTS.
Large, multispecific stands of reef are present all around the island. The
reefs are relatively restricted in extent offshore due to steep slopes and
deep waters, but what's present looks very healthy, for all intents and
purposes. If you took the biased transect survey approach and focused on
'good reef' as Doug calls it, you're looking at upward of 50-60% cover
across the board. Some very large and well established colonies of Acropora
muricata are present.
Usefully, monitoring from both 30 and 20 years ago indicated a similar
story, though there's no photos to compare against, just written reports.
Importantly, the old monitoring noted the presence of Halimeda back then,
and it's still there as a feature of the ecosystem, but doesn't appear to
have taken over at all. The turtles eat it, as they have always done. I
also found extensive tracts of contiguous reef in places where Allen's
Coral Atlas indicates it to be absent.
There's some evidence of overfishing of reef fish (related to human
population pressure) but the reef structure and live coral cover do not
match a narrative of 'systemic mass destruction' or even 'gradual ongoing
decline'.
I'd hazard a guess that much of the Louisiade Archipelago looks about the
same as I can think of no reason why Misima is a special case in terms of
broader regional oceanographic processes that may render it immune from
large scale changes. Louisiade is a large area without that much pressure
on the reefs (compared to those areas proximate to industry and lots of
people etc.), aside from what happens on land, and the locals dropping
fishing lines over the edge of dugout canoes.
And to open myself up to mass vitriol no doubt...on the climate
issue...hasn't the 'official data' shown no net warming over the last 7
years now? Call me a glass half fuller, but I prefer that signal over
models and doomsday prophets that have been, to be honest, wrong more often
than not.
The above examples seem like a disconnect between what media reports are
telling us and observed reality (again, fully recognising that I have not
been everywhere, but for context I have also dived in Madagascar, Belize,
Fiji, American Samoa, Mexico, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar,
Thailand and Egypt). The recent GBR situation also fits in the 'disconnect'
basket to my mind. It's simply not 'dead' as it was all but proclaimed to
be, and that's a good thing.
I'm not looking to downplay the clearly depressing decline that has occured
where it has, particularly the Caribbean. As we know, much of the decline
is due to direct mechanical damage by irresponsible behaviors (of which
there are many that folks here don't need to be reminded of too much, from
coral mining to stupid anchoring to poor diving technique to cyanide and
dynamite to destructive fishing practices etc. etc.), combined with the
downstream effects of catchment-level decisions and poor coastal zone
management i.e., direct pollution, sedimentation/nitrification etc. You
know, 'the usual stuff' leading to death by a thousand cuts. Stuff that
seems simple in an ideal world, particularly to us, to avoid. Add natural
processes/variability to that as well (being things that reefs have dealt
with for aeons). My point being that in the absence of these things, at the
local scale especially, reefs grow and change in ways and for reasons we
still don't fully understand. Dynamic equilibrium and all.
Please don't yell at me or label me a climate denier or any such
thought-limiting pejorative. Call me a heathen if you must, but as I said,
just sharing recent personal observations. Evidently we all have our own
examples one way or the other. I'm simply stating that in my patch of the
waterworld, the reefs of PNG, where I've been, and where people haven't
made an obvious mess, seem to be doing okay.
Best,
Ivan
On Wednesday, February 9, 2022, Douglas Fenner via Coral-List <
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
> Yes, but both of these studies are based on the quantitative
> results of 10's of thousands of reef monitoring or surveying sites. The
> people who did those studies did NOT make that data up. That's one thing
> for sure. The data was real. And we can choose to ignore it if it doesn't
> fit with our life experiences, or we can try to deal with it. I think we
> need to try to deal with it.
> One of the things I've thought of sometimes when Gene is telling us
> about Florida reefs, is that although I have absolutely NO doubt he's
> telling us the truth, and it is good to be reminded, Florida is not the
> world, and the reefs there, if anything, in their construction, are unusual
> for coral reefs around the world. They're not like an atoll (the world has
> about 400 atolls), the living parts are usually called the "Florida Reef
> Tract" presumably in part because they don't look like a lot of other
> reefs. As far as I know, the areas that have living coral are tiny patch
> reefs.
> The Caribbean has been the site of probably more research per sq km
> of reef than most anywhere else in the world. The western Atlantic has a
> set of species that is virtually unique in the world, very few fish species
> and no known native reef coral species are in common with the
> Indo-Pacific. And now it turns out, it may not be representative of the
> rest of the reefs of the world.
> Notice that all your memories but one that you quote are from the western
> Atlantic, the Caribbean and Florida. Remember Mike Risk pointing to the
> paper from Indonesia which reported on a lava flow, which incinerated
> anything alive it hit and produced a whole new surface. If I remember,
> within 6 years, it had a thriving coral reef ecosystem with lots of coral
> cover. I've read people writing that the Coral Triangle is going down hill
> steeply. That doesn't fit with my experience in the Philippines at about
> 200 dive sites. Granted, I've always thought that people there showed me
> the best sites, I do not claim they were randomly chosen or
> representative. And I haven't been back for about 15 years or so. But
> those sites showed no signs of the degradation that is apparent virtually
> everywhere in the Caribbean (Cozumel, Mexico, one of my old haunts, has
> probably degraded less than most in the Caribbean, Tom Goreau tells me it
> has lost some coral cover which has largely been replaced with sponge). In
> the Philippines, one place I saw early on, there was nothing but dead coral
> rubble. I asked the resort dive people and they said a typhoon destroyed
> it. I came back 11 years later, and couldn't find it, until I realized
> that the mass of near 100% glorious, diverse, coral cover in front of my
> nose was it. It had completely recovered. The AIMS monitoring results
> show the same effect, on a vastly greater scale, and quantitatively.
> Please look at those graphs, and see the radical loss of coral cover that
> had all of us scared to death. And notice that the coral cover completely
> recovered. That is completely unlike any location in the Caribbean.
> Discovery Bay, Jamaica, over 40 years after it lost its coral cover, still
> hasn't recovered.
> A review by Roff and Mumby put their finger on it. The western
> Atlantic has far less resilience than the Indo-Pacific. Reference below.
> They try to figure out why, and the why may still be an open question. But
> the evidence is that the Caribbean and Florida have not recovered, yet in
> the Indo-Pacific, often reefs do recover. And there have always been
> plenty of natural disturbances, the clearest example being cyclones,
> typhoons and hurricanes (basically the same thing except which way they
> rotate differs north and south of the equator). These cyclonic storms have
> been happening for time immemorial, surely much longer than coral reefs
> have existed, probably at least a couple billion years. They can
> completely flatten coral reefs, and they do that some reefs somewhere every
> year. Yet coral reefs are still here. How can that be?? Coral reefs can
> recover from them. Coral reefs are dynamic instead of static, they are
> continually in recovery from one thing or another. But most natural
> disturbances are brief and allow time for recovery, human disturbance, like
> sedimentation, nutrients, overfishing, are continuous, no time for
> recovery. Caribbean reefs have lost that ability to recover, Indo-Pacific
> reefs have largely not. My impression is that some reefs in the Indian
> Ocean have recovered from the 1998 El Nino mass bleaching, but others have
> not. So it isn't universal. But the new graphs of world coral cover tell
> us that lots of reefs have been able to recover enough that world coral
> cover has been roughly steady at about 30% for decades. Surprising, yes.
> Live and learn.
> The world in some ways is now a small place, humans are now well into
> the process of destroying SO much of it, not only on land but in the oceans
> and even the atmosphere. That is undeniable. But this new evidence may
> (may) indicate less corals have been lost that we often think. What the
> original coral cover was like, IMHO (in my humble opinion) is not really
> well established, there was far too few early studies. Fact is, if you go
> diving and collect data, you can only cover a tiny area. There are loads
> of reefs in the oceans out there that have received little or no research,
> and almost all of those are in the Indo-Pacific, because it is gigantic,
> even though coral reefs are a tiny proportion of the world oceans. No one
> person has seen a majority of the world's coral reefs, and only a few have
> seen a large number of them, my guess is people like Jack Randall and
> Charlie Veron may have seen the most, I'm certainly not among them, though
> I've seen some. So the rest of us have necessarily seen a very
> unrepresentative sample of the world's coral reefs.
> More powerful that the graphs of the world's coral reefs I think,
> are the AIMS monitoring records of the Great Barrier Reef, itself not a
> small place. And those records clearly show that huge loss of cover
> followed by its recovery. It does not document any changes or stability in
> community composition, no one claims that. But it shows that the reports
> of the GBR being half dead, are from a past snapshot in time, and no longer
> true. It has come back, Phoenix-like, from half dead (not by individual
> corals coming back to life but the birth and growth of new individual
> corals). That is the reality, I don't know anyone who disputes it. Nobody
> has better data on the course over time of the corals on the GBR, as far as
> I know, and it is plain for all to see.
> That appears to be the reality, and I think we need to reflect
> that. Which means we need to do a better job of making what we say reflect
> reality. I think. Yes it is disconcerting to have our world view
> challenged. So goes science and life. Mountains of data challenge the
> views of those who said there was no global warming. Mountains of data
> challenge the views of those who say there is no evolution, that God made
> earth and the life on it exactly as it is today. Mountains of data
> challenge the view the earth is flat. Maybe, just maybe, one of our more
> cherished views, will need revision. The Great Barrier Reef and the
> Indo-Pacific corals are not dead.
> What happens in the future to coral reefs is quite disconnected to
> what has already happened. But the Caribbean and Florida are surely a
> window into what the future for the rest of the world's reefs are going to
> experience in the next 20-30 years, by all accounts. The fact that not all
> the reefs are already dead does not prove that corals will be just fine in
> the future. And all the many observations and measurements documenting the
> demise of reefs are real. Though some like those on the Great Barrier
> Reef, may turn out to be followed by at least temporary recovery. Our
> problem is that the places we have personally seen, and the places we have
> studied most, are not either representative or a random sample of the
> world's reefs, and so the very real info we have about the decline of
> individual reefs is not totally representative of the world's reefs. The
> data from the GBR appears to me to prove that, the world data now suggests
> it.
> So we live and learn. Cheers, Doug
>
> On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 7:04 AM Phillip Dustan via Coral-List <
> coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
>
> > Dear Listers,
> > Coral monitoring began using transects that we first used to
> understand
> > the distribution of corals on reefs. Scientists found that corals grow in
> > patches dictated by the prevailing environmental conditions. These
> patches
> > were frequently expressed as long bands or groves dominated by a few
> > species that ran parallel to the shoreline or perpendicular to the
> > prevailing seas. Tom Goreau's Ecology of West Indian Coral Reefs 1:
> > Species Composition and Zonation as well as Pacific accounts by the
> likes
> > of John Wells and others pointed this out beautifully. Coral cover in
> some
> > zones was, and still may be, very high approaching 100% but it depends on
> > the methodology. Does one count the intercolony spaces between Acropora
> > palmata branches or foliose Agaricia plates? This was the great debate
> of
> > the 1970-80's, "How best to measure coral cover"- lines, points, chains,
> > photos, quadrats,........the quest was on for the ultimate measure.
> Some
> > of us revisited out old study sites to look for change out of curiosity.
> > Then, reefs began to die and coral monitoring became the mantra- Monitor
> > reefs for conservation. Reef monitoring EXPLODED! In some places it
> > became institutionalized. Fixed vs "random" sampling was the new dilemma;
> > How many transects, photos, points- the search was on again for the
> > "ultimate" measure.
> > All the while reefs were winking out episodically. A rash of disease,
> or
> > mass bleaching event would strike and coral cover would drop accordingly.
> > Corals would regrow is the interval between acute stress was long enough.
> > All the while though, oter factors continued to "eat away" are live
> corals.
> > In places where I have remeasured the same reef, I have witnessed losses
> of
> > over 90% in the Florida Keys where the zones were richly covered. On
> > Dancing Lady Reef in Discovery Bay, Jamaica, the cover of Orbicella spp
> on
> > the fore reef slope dropped from over 50% to less than 10 and from +25%
> to
> > near 0% on the fore reef terrace (
> > https://biospherefoundation.org/project/coral-reef-change/). This was
> just
> > a single species and the reef was heavily covered with other species. My
> > studies in NW Bali, Indonesia revealed a 44% loss from a single bleaching
> > event as measured with repeat transects. The Bahamas yielded similar
> > results due to bleaching combined with hurricanes. OVerall, the Florida
> > Keys has lost over 38% cover since 1996 using repeated marked video
> > transects.. My point is that these studies are all with repeated measure
> > methods and they all reveal the same ecological slide into loss of
> > ecological integrity. Detecting change is not the same as tabulating
> coral
> > cover.
> > A number of years ago I asked Listers if there were any healthy
> reefs
> > in the Caribbean. It generated a raft of replies, but none positive.
> Maybe
> > a few were missed and there are whole expeditions roaming the seas
> looking
> > for healthy reefs now so they can be "protected". And liveaboard dive
> boats
> > roam ply the tropics promising pristine adventures on ever increasingly
> > more remote reefs (which are running out). Coral reefs are tough. They
> > used to be hard to kill by natural means, but humans are a different
> story.
> > Until we deal with how humanity integrates itself into the Biosphere, no
> > reef or any other natural habitat for that matter, will be safe from
> > humanity's global reach of destruction.
> > We may be making a few tenuous steps in the right direction but you just
> > can't put a happy face on any of this......
> > Phil
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Feb 7, 2022 at 7:00 PM Eugene Shinn via Coral-List <
> > coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
> >
> > > I agree with Alina Szmant's comments. I began diving in the Florida
> Keys
> > > in the 1950s. Also visited many Caribbean reefs in the 1980s and 1990s.
> > > All I saw was reefs going down hill after 1983 including those at San
> > > Salvador which is located well east of the Main Bahama banks reefs. See
> > > a portion of the dying Florida reefs
> > > here:<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnIzLTi0HGs
> > > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnIzLTi0HGs>> Eugene Shinn
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Coral-List mailing list
> > > Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> > > https://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/mailman/listinfo/coral-list
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> >
> > Phillip Dustan PhD
> > Charleston SC 29424
> > 843-953-8086 office
> > 843-224-3321 (mobile)
> >
> > "When we try to pick out anything by itself
> > we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords
> > that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe. "
> > * John Muir 1869*
> >
> > *A Swim Through TIme on Carysfort Reef*
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCPJE7UE6sA
> > *Raja Ampat Sustainability Project video*
> >
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RR2SazW_VY&fbclid=
> IwAR09oZkEk8wQkK6LN3XzVGPgAWSujACyUfe2Ist__nYxRRSkDE_jAYqkJ7A
> > *Bali Coral Bleaching 2016 video*
> >
> > *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxOfLTnPSUo
> > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxOfLTnPSUo>*
> > TEDx Charleston on saving coral reefs
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwENBNrfKj4
> > Google Scholar Citations:
> > https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HCwfXZ0AAAAJ
> > _______________________________________________
> > Coral-List mailing list
> > Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> > https://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/mailman/listinfo/coral-list
> >
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