How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 123: Great Barrier Reef Corals Experiencing a Coral Bleaching Event
Coral bleaching is synonymous with Climate Change and unfortunately, high global temperatures this year as brought on another coral bleaching event in a UNESCO Heritage Site. Today, I talk about what is happening, why it happened, and what we can do about it.
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http://www.speakupforblue.com/session123
Welcome to the Speaker for Blue podcast session 123 today on the episode we're going to talk about something that's going on that's a little disturbing but we kind of expected this year. There's a coral bleaching event going on in the Great Barrier Reef some shallow reefs are being highly affected and we're hoping that it's not a prolonged one and I'm going to tell you why in this episode of the Speaker for Blue podcast stay tuned. Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue podcast helping you get involved in ocean conservation and now here's your host the Just Discover Periscope and might be slightly addicted Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody welcome back to another episode of the Speak Up for Blue podcast your voice for the ocean I am your host Andrew Lewin founder speakupforblue.com marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer and still sick believe it or not still sick Mike I still have a cough I've got a cold so I apologize for coughing or my voice being a little out of whack today but I'm still continuing to doing these podcasts I miss Mondays but I'm here back on Tuesday and then of course today's podcast on Wednesday normally we have an interview set up but because I was sick I didn't get one done so we're going to talk about something that the theme is kind of continuing this week with climate change yesterday we spoke about how Leonardo DiCaprio after winning an Oscar for the first time something that a lot of people felt that he was long overdue and waited such a long time in his career to get he went up and did his speech but instead of doing a speech thanking everybody saying how you know how much he deserves it and other people have helped him he started talking about climate change and how we need to support politicians and governments who are supporting climate change emissions reductions and not promoting sort of the greed of oil and gas and I think that's really important so I thought it was really interesting how he used that time for himself that he could have used for himself and he used it to promote something that we are in a huge need of and he got some flak for it which I was surprised I didn't think he would but he got some flak for it and and now you know I did an episode on yesterday and today we're going to talk about what the consequences of climate change is and that is one of the wonders of the world the Great Barrier Reef is undergoing a bleaching event it's happening in parts it's not happening all around the Great Barrier Reef but it's happening in parts where there are some patches the patches of bleaching mostly in shallow areas and the danger here is some of the local weather conditions are are saying that the conditions are going to stay the same for over the next few weeks now before we get into a lot of these things I wanted I want to before we get into further stories I just wanted to thank our patreon supporters the people who support this podcast Kristen Claire Jefford Judy and Ron and Dr. Judith Weiss thank you very much for supporting us in our ocean conservation message spreading the ocean conservation message through the podcast community we appreciate that a great deal okay so on to the story if you don't know what bleaching is essentially coral reefs have color there are many different species of corals right they are they are an animal they are not a plant a lot of people get them confused with plants they are an animal and they what they do is they have color and they have like a flushiness to them there's a skeleton part as well but there's a flushiness to them and what happens is they get this influx of or they have these these little plankton in them they're they're phytoplankton and they're called zoanthellae and I don't know if I'm actually pronouncing it probably I never knew if I was actually pronouncing it for a different pronunciation but it's called zoanthellae and what these are these these little phytoplankton which is basically a little plant species that absorb the that that hide in the in the in the skeleton of the coral they absorb the light of the sun and when they're byproducts of that light of that photosynthesis allows the coral to to to use calcium and build its build its um build the skeleton so it's extremely important for corals to have these zoanthellae now if there's too much heat too much temperature too much light and the waters become too hot then these coral re these corals these zoanthellae get out of the coral body okay of the coral skeleton so a lot of times when the zoanthellae you'll see that it's nice and healthy coral you'll see its little fleshy it's got some color to it it's got a lot of color pink orange purple green some very interesting colors and then but when they once it gets hot they they skedaddle they're out right and then you see just this white coral and it's it's really it's really tough to see that kind of thing because you have this wonderful thing you know this wonderful coral that each coral makes you you know a number of corals make a reef it allows people to it allows fish to inhabit them it actually provides a lot of biodiversity a functioning healthy reef provides shore stability a lot of different things we've talked about on the podcast all the benefits of this reef however if these zoanthellae leave the corals the corals cannot build their skeleton they cannot maintain their skeleton and if the zoanthellae they do not come back in so that means if the water temperature stays this that temperature the temperature the threshold at which the zoanthellae will exit the coral if it stays out if that water temperature stays the same for a prolonged period then the zoanthellae will not get back in and the coral will die okay and this can happen in a lot of places that is getting extreme heat hence especially while you're getting coral bleaching in shallow areas the water gets warmer faster is it hitting more light it's getting more light because it's shallow so you're getting a lot more bleaching events now this is a this we kind of expected bleaching to happen this year because it's been so warm and it actually has been going on for quite a bit this is just one article there have been other places where there are coral coral bleaching events that have gone on this year how many i don't know the severity to be honest i don't know all the different stories that have come out i try and i know i i don't read all them i don't i don't have all them on the podcast i'll talk about all them on the podcast but there have been a number of that i've seen this one i always want to talk about because it's the grape berry reef it's one of the you know one eight wonders of the world it's uh it's a world heritage site you know it's just it's one of those those icons you do not want to lose and you know it's just one of those things where you have to talk about when something happens like this so now how do we really go like how are these how are we going to do this how are we going to fix this i don't know unfortunately right now these corals are really up to what the weather is going to what's going to happen with the weather uh one of the authorities um they're they talked to somebody here the grape berry reef marine park authority um on choose a uh said patchy bleaching had already been detected on multiple reefs mainly shallow reefs and the weather forecast of upcoming hot conditions posed a dangerous threat over the next few weeks so it says in a statement the authority said the conditions had triggered level one incidence response which means it involved a lot of in water field surveys and monitoring by the authorities and researchers so what's good about this is the fact that they're detecting it they're going to actually do a lot of research surveys on this and they're going to look at this and you know try and figure out if there's specific zoanthetic because there are different species of the doing tele that are leaving how the corals are doing how many corals were damaged in this in this event hopefully it won't be that many but it looks like there's going to be some um because they're always some and then you know going back and seeing how how it does so it's good that you know you have a lot of you know an incident where there's some sort of emergency response and there's there's some sort of action however nothing really can be done at this point um it's interesting that there's uh the there's a group i believe in australia called 350 dot org and it's a climate action advocacy group and they call it you know this is interesting they called uh for uh what does it say here uh that the government should block uh what would be australia's largest coal mine by indian mining giant adani and commit to halting new fossil fuel projects nationally now i find this is interesting i know why these climate groups are asking for this they they want to take this this event and say hey we got to stop everything look i don't like the use of fossil fuels as much as the next person we kind of talked about this yesterday with the lino de caprio thing however we are now dependent on fossil fuels and until we find something new or until we start to use something new or we have an infrastructure to use something new we can't take our dependency off of it so the fact that you know this group is asking for the halting of any new of any fossil new fossil fuel projects i can understand where they're going from there but if we really rely on it then it's kind of tough it's kind of tough to say i don't like saying that but it's very difficult not to now with that said there are a lot of countries now who are really investing in renewable energy infrastructure such as solar power and solar panels in fact there is a study or there's a news article about a month or two ago saying that the us actually has employed more people for the solar industry than they did for oil and gas last year that's that's pretty encouraging knowing that there is a huge influx of of jobs that means there's more use in solar panels and a lot of the hydro areas the the energy industry in Canada i know are utilizing renewable energy such as wind farms as well as solar panels so we're getting there but do we stop all fossil fuel projects all new ones maybe i don't know that's that's that's an interesting you know from an extreme point of view yeah i would say we would love to but can we do it in a realistic point of view i don't know if we can do it just yet but i understand why they're coming through that they're trying to take advantage now i know this this mining this coal mine is a big issue in australia because not only is it interesting just because it's a coal mine but it's also there it's interesting because apparently the dredgerate from this coal mine is supposed to be dumped in the grape a reef or the the mining uh company asked to be to dump the dredgerate in the grape a reef which let's be honest that's a pretty bad move you know even from a pr standpoint it's like i'm going to take all of my waste that has minerals and then has uh you know you're basically taking all the waste which some of the mining uh you know efforts that i've seen the waste can have a lot of arsenic mercury all that kind of thing and you're going to put it in one of the wonders of the world eight wonders of the world not a good move uh from a pr standpoint or just from an ethical standpoint however that's what they wanted to do and i believe the australian government has tentatively approved this project i don't know if they've approved that dumping of the dredgerate but i hope they didn't um but all of you australian listeners out there let me know if they have or not by on the comments you can comment on the show notes speak up for blue dot com forward slash session 123 um but let's get back to the story i kind of went on a tangent here um you know look we're we're in a situation where we're right now we're just paying for the consequences of what's happening in the world we're paying for uh above average uh temperature year we're you know we're paying for all this climate stuff and it probably with this year happening in the last few years happening where they've been the warmest on record it probably helped those climate change talk climate change talks where everybody said okay we're going to reduce our use um but right now we're in a situation where we just kind of have to wait and see and hope and hope that we can do better hope that we could um hope that we could you know these coral reefs are actually going to survive and we don't have to worry uh too much about that and it's unfortunate that we have to do that but unfortunately that's what is happening in our lives right now now you know if you've been listening to this podcast that i talk a lot about marine protected areas and unfortunately there haven't been um a lot of studies that have come out where they talk about how you incorporate climate change in marine protected areas because it's difficult usually what happens is you say okay um marine protected areas we take out the human influence of things so we take out the overfishing we take out uh the tourism we take out the water quality or not even water quality but any kind of development in that area any kind of human extraction or human um hands-on kind of things and then we let the reef or we let the area the habitat sort of adjust on its own to other larger factors ocean acidification uh higher sea sea surface temperatures higher sea level rise because we can't really control that hands-on that's what i really have in the marine protected areas now tomorrow i've actually i'm actually going to be covering a study that incorporates sea surface temperature in marine planning and marine protected areas so that's going to be interesting so stay tuned for that but until then right now all we have to do is wait and look at these tragic coral bleaching events and say oh my god like this is the reality of this thing you know you got to remember the grapeberry reef provides a lot of biodiversity provides a lot of stability for the Australian ocean uh and and it's and its species that use coral reefs as sort of uh a way to get food a way to hide from predators a way to just live not only that it helps bring it helps bring stability to the australian coast it helps bring tourism money uh you know if it's which is a huge thing in australia right now it just it's just it's one of the eight wonders of the world for god's sakes it's a world heritage site we have to we want to protect this we have to protect this and to be honest from a scientist and marine ecologist point of view who's interested in marine protected area planning this is like the the mecca of of marine planning you know the grapeberry reef is a great uh example of how uh network of marine protected areas with multiple management levels worked and was was implemented uh and it's it's used a lot as an example it's not perfect but it uses a lot as an example for other areas in the world where it can be used so it's it's one of those things where you know you want to you want to protect it so unfortunately right now we just have to wait and see but hopefully in the future we're gonna see some reductions we won't see such a high temperature uh root sort of event like this but unfortunately it looks like it's gonna happen man i just realized i use the word unfortunately quite a bit sorry about that pretty much for listening before we go i just want to remind you that if you want to help uh sponsor or help support this podcast our ocean conservation message and that we're spreading through the podcasting community you can do so by going to speak up for blue.com/patreon P-A-R-P-A-T-R-E-O-N sorry it's P-A-T-R-E-O-N and you can put in a level of support bay odds a monthly support system um so just keep that in mind but it helps us not only spread our ocean conservation message through the podcasting community but we also want to go to other platforms such as video platforms such as youtube as well as digital magazine platforms so if you want to support that you can go to speakupforblue.com/patreon P-A-T-R-E-O-N and we would appreciate your support on that thank you very much for listening to speakup for blue podcast i am your host angel Owen and happy wednesday and happy conservation day. 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