How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 100: 100th Episode and Coral Abundance in the Great Barrier Reef
It is with great pleasure that I announce the 100th episode of the Speak Up For Blue Podcast. I have a little something special planned, but you will have to listen to find out.
On today's Research Thursday, I chat about coral abundance on the Great Barrier Reef and a few studies that have found management of corals better when human disturbances were regulated (eliminated). Find out what I mean by listening to the podcast.
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Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session100
Welcome to the Speaker for Blue Podcast session 100. Yes, I said it. Session 100, this is the 100th episode of the Speaker for Blue podcast. I can just remember recording episode one way back when and releasing it in June 22nd. So it's been over seven months and we are at the 100th episode. It's going fantastic. I really want to thank you for supporting us and getting us to this level. The number of downloads and reach is just increasing at an exponential rate, which I love. So thank you for your support and thank you for sharing. We're going to talk a little bit about the 100th episode today. But we're also going to talk about some coral reef dynamics in today's world and the issues they face. So stay tuned for this episode of the Speaker for Blue podcast. Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue podcast. Helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now here's your host. Can't get the song bad blood out of his head. Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the 100th 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 I am happy. I'm so happy to announce that this is our 100th episode. I know it may not be a big deal to a lot of you, but it's amazing for me. Want to stick to something this long, but also to just get to this milestone. And it's interesting in the last few weeks. I've hit a lot of other milestones. Our number of downloads has just risen like crazy exponentially. And it's just keeps rising and rising and rising, which is awesome. And the reason why it's awesome is on two levels. One is we get to reach more people. We're reaching more people. We're getting more people involved. And in about in a second, you're going to hear a couple of stories about what the podcast has done for people. And and how that's affected people, which is awesome, which really it touches my heart because that's the whole point of this podcast is to reach people and tell them how they can help protect the ocean and seem so far that I've done it. I don't care if I've done it to one person or two people or just under 10 or just more than that or hundreds. I just want to reach as many people as possible. And whoever does act on it, I just I just love it because my job is done because I get people to act on it and I inspire people to act on it, which is amazing. That's the whole point of this podcast. We're also today, we're going to talk about before we hear from the people. We're also going to talk about, you know, some research Thursday stuff, because that's what we do. We're going to talk about coral cover. I've been looking into this issue for a little bit now in the grape berry reef. Obviously, a lot of sets of reef and it's probably one of the largest, it is the largest berry reef in the world. It's got a lot of marine protected areas. It's very protective. It's got its issues, of course, with some mining issues where they want to dump some some sludge and things like that and it's been the paper for a while. But we are sorry in the news for a while. But it's interesting to see some scientific literature on, you know, what scientists are looking at and what they're looking at, what we're going to get into today, we're going to look at how coral cover has changed and what is changing and what are the effects in the recovery rates and whatnot. So I think it's very interesting to look at from a from a marine conservation perspective, get just a knowledge. Of course, the science allows us to understand what's happening and what we can do for management afterwards. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Before I do, I want to kind of, I've got a couple of things I want to talk about. A couple of people have come to me over the last few months and said, Hey, Andrew, your podcast is great. It's really affected me. Two people, two people that I know, which is which is great. One person is is Darlene. My friend Darlene, she lives in Hong Kong. And she sent me this great note that I want to read to you today because it's a 100th episode. I want to kind of just celebrate that by talking about the people that have changed their ways, just their natural ways, or just become more aware of what's happening and wanted to act. And Darlene is one of them. Darlene and her partners are one of the two of the people who have done so. So I just wanted to read this out quickly for you. She says, send me an email, said, Andrew, I want to share, I want to share my sincere appreciation for your podcast and the voice of awareness you bring to the ocean conservation. In one podcast, you discuss the top five global contributors to the ocean's plastics troubles. And this really hit home for me. One of the top five is China, which for the past 10 years has been my home first Beijing and now Hong Kong. Although Hong Kong does a lot to clean up its beaches, one of the fundamental aspects of keeping garbage out of the ocean is missing, which is recycling. Right after hearing this podcast, my partner and I decided to take action. One, we searched for recycling bins in our neighborhood. We found some. Two, we started separating our garbage and carrying it out of our apartment to the recycling area we found. Three, started keeping cutlery and glass bowls at the office for use when picking up takeaway lunch. Now, these changes may seem elementary to you in Hong Kong, but in Hong Kong, recycling is not easy. Your podcast inspired us to take action and figure out how we can decrease our garbage contribution, both at home and at work, keep up the awareness and inspiration. Now, this is amazing for me because this doesn't happen on a regular basis. You know, when I first started out with this podcast, I just wanted to let people know what's happening. I want to inspire people to change their ways and really look for something, but I didn't expect a lot. Because you never know, right? You never know who you're reaching. You never know if they're listening properly. You never know if they're actually going to take action. A lot of people want to take action, but you know, we have our lives when it's hard to change our lives. Darlene and her partner have really just come through. And, you know, they actually went out and searched for recycling bins and recycling centers. They live in an apartment, which usually doesn't recycle and doesn't recycle in this case. So they have to actually lug their recycling, separate their garbage, lug their recycling, and go down to these centers and put them in. That's a lot of effort for people who have full-time jobs, for people who have a life of their own, and a very busy one at that. So, Darlene, thank you very much. I really appreciate you saying this email. And I really appreciate you telling me that it was because of the podcast that inspired you. And the fact that you're actually doing something about it and going out of your way to do something about it really makes me feel great. And I hope it makes you feel great as well. And I hope by you leading by example, your friends and other people, your coworkers, see the same thing and start to do the same thing. I think it's just a fantastic way. And it's a great, it's a great start to really protecting the oceans and understanding that it starts with us. You know, the use of plastic and the use of non-recycled materials can really affect our oceans and the fact that you reduce and eliminate that on multiple levels is fantastic. So thank you very much for that note. I really appreciate it. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to, I've got this new thing. It's called Speak Pipe. And it's a voice recorder. So what people can do is they can actually click on this on the link and I'll tell you in a minute. And they can actually record their voices and you can connect with us. So I figured, you know, what's a great way to really hear people record, like hear what they're doing, but hear from their voices themselves. So what I did is my, a friend of mine, Graham, who I work at with, is a teacher. He teaches grade seven. And he told me, he came up and told me the other day that he used one of the podcasts in his, in, in during his teaching, one time of teaching human impacts on the environment. And he's going to, I'm going to play this recording for you that he did. So if you go to speakupforblue.com/connect, you can actually just click on this link and record your voice through your computer. And if you have a question for me or you want to say how you're changing because of this podcast or even just you're changing the way you live for a better ocean, you can do so at speakupforblue.com/connect. I think it's the time limit is five minutes. But you know, keep it brief and I'll play it on the podcast. And we get to hear more and more people on how they work. If you're already, if you're already doing something or you decide to do something about it, I just want to hear what you're doing so we can share it with the audience. But here is Graham, a grade seven teacher and how he used the podcast for his, for his teaching. Hello, my name is Graham and I access the Speakup for Blue podcast as a learning tool in my classroom. Recently, my students were all involved in the research of a topic of choice around human impact on the environment. And several of them chose topics involving the world's oceans, specifically plastic in the ocean and coral reef destruction. During the research time, as we were exploring sources, I shared the Speakup for Blue podcast and website with them as a research tool and was excited to share the podcasts for a number of reasons. First of all, the podcasts contain a wealth of information that my students could use to learn about their topics. But they also involve discussions with people with expertise on these topics. And I figured what better way for my students to learn than by hearing experts in the field speak about the topics themselves. It also diversified their sources beyond books and websites and helped open their eyes a little bit to other options for learning and finding information. For some students listening to a conversation is also a much more engaging option than sifting through information on a website or in a book. And being able to listen to information also makes it much more accessible to some of my students as they're all at different points in their learning of literacy skills and learning the English language itself. Lastly, one of the challenges for my class for my students with their project was to discuss what people could do to address the issue that they had chosen to research and focus on. And the podcasts actually served a double purpose there as it showed them that there are people out there actively engaging and spreading awareness and in action to make a difference in the world. So not only did the students get information about their topic from the podcast, but the podcast also served as a model for them of steps that can be taken to start dealing with environmental issues that they've been learning about. So isn't that awesome that that, you know, some students here, the podcast, they get directed to the website and they start using it. They start citing it in their reports. That makes me feel so good inside. You don't understand it. It's just, it's just a lot of fun that people are actually using this and it's inspiring change, inspiring people to actually learn more about the ocean and the effects on plastic. And then hopefully inspire them to do action afterwards. And I do a lot of teaching in, in classes when I can. I've taught my daughter's class as a few times, and I just love how they get into it. And they love the ocean. And that is what I like to do. And that's what, you know, that's the whole point of the podcast, the whole point of teaching, a whole point of ocean conservation is to make, educate people on the, on, on the, on the ocean and its species, its habitats, talk about the ocean, the issues that it face and faces and then inspire action to be taken by guiding them, telling people how you can take action. And the fact that Graham picked this up and used it for his class is amazing. It really, you know, now we're scaling the amount of people that are listening to this. So I think it's just fantastic. And this has inspired me to come up with more teacher resources in an upcoming interview next week with Esther Overbeak. We talk about how we can allow teachers, empower teachers with the knowledge of marine conservation in terms of presentations and materials to teach their, their, their kids, their students, and so forth. So we're going to see a lot more of that in the future, hopefully in 2016. But anyway, thank you very much, Graham. Thank you very much, Darlene, for those notes. If you want to send a note, either recorded or you can send it by email or our contact page, you can do so. If you want to go to our contact page to speakupforblue.com/contact. But even better, if you want to record your message, you can go to speakupforblue.com/connect. We'll put the link on the show note episodes, which will be, which is www.speakupforblue/session100, because it is our 100th episode. I'm not sure if I mentioned that, but I'm really happy about it. But anyway, you can leave a message. It's really easy. All you have to do is just record through your computer. If you have a microphone that's even better, but usually a lot of these laptops or computers have built in microphones, you can record the message and I will play it on air. I will play it on the podcast. So that would be wonderful if you can do that. So let's get onto our show. It's Research Thursdays. We're going to talk about coral reefs in the Great Barrier Reef. Great Barrier Reef is really special to me. I'm going to say this on a serious note. It is. It's very special to me. It's very special to a lot of marine biologists. The fact that the Great Barrier Reef is around, it's almost like on a bucket list of every marine biologist or every marine conservation is to visit or to work on because it's the epitome of marine conservation. It's the epitome of protection. It's under constant threat from different issues, local issues, sedimentation, water pollution, nutrients, influx, dumping of mining materials apparently in the last little bit. There's a lot of problems facing it, but the fact that's a Great Barrier Reef marine park, it's actually a marine protected area or a network of marine protected areas from marine conservation standpoint is really the epitome is the example that you want to follow. And of course it's so vast, so beautiful. It's the biggest barrier reef in the world. You just want to see it survive. You're glad that there's a lot of protection involved and it becomes like the benchmark of marine protected areas, something that I'm very into. So the fact, I wanted to put this, there's a couple things that kind of came into light which are not really going to be covered on this podcast that allowed me to really look into the Great Barrier Reef. And maybe one day I'll tell you about them, but right now we'll just kind of not talk about, we're just going to talk about the Great Barrier Reef. And we talked about coral coverage, some of the science that goes behind coral cover, it's really a measure of how much coral is actually underwater, how much coral is available to provide habitat for fish species and invertebrates and all these other species that are around that makes it so diverse and so beautiful. The lower the coral cover, and usually it's measured by percentage, so 100% being full coral cover, zero percent being obviously absent, the higher the diversity, right? The more stable the habitat is, the more resilient it is towards changes and so forth. Now, of course, like everywhere coral reefs are going through some major changes, they have some major threats and there are some natural threats and there are some what we call anthropogenic threats, which are people threats. Now, some of the natural threats would be like cyclone activity, so storms, so cyclones down in the major storm events are called in the South Pacific, and you have some invasive species, which are what they call them for short cots, which are basically a starfish species that comes in eats coral. They get these large infestations that can actually just destroy coral. Now, there are some management effects to it, but they can be pretty invasive and they're still not good for coral and a lot of coral cover gets reduced because of these cots, and you get a lot of just coral bleaching from major coral beach and coral bleaching events. Now, the one great thing, and then of course what I've mentioned, the anthropogenic threats. Now, the one great thing about the Great Barrier Reef is there's a lot of data on it. People have been doing surveys, reef surveys, they've been tracking the oceanography, the mineralogical activity for years, and there's some major data sets, you know, stemming 100 years, 30 years, you know, and so forth. And I wanted to talk about just a couple of different, a couple of different, I've read a couple of different literature, a couple of different research papers that have really looked at the fact of what affects coral cover and how to manage it. And the science behind it essentially, they look at the invasive species, the cots, they look at cyclone activity, and really when it comes to cyclone activity, they measure it by the amount of wind that it faces. So the gale force winds, because it is high winds, so which could be like 32 meters per second, which is really, really fast. And then the length of that, the duration of that gale force wind, so how long does that value actually hit? So 32, say 32 meters per second, how long is that actually around for? So you look at those, that's really effective cyclones. Now cyclones can actually, it will affect corals, but only for a little bit, right? It'll, it'll disturb the coral reef, it might destroy some corals, but then corals can actually regenerate and can build back up. And so coral cover can actually rebuild back up, because it is a natural thing. It's natural event, it doesn't happen all the time, doesn't happen all the time in the same area. But it does happen, and it can be very disruptive at times, but it can allow more diversity, different corals to, to, to recover through there, through that process. And then you have coral bleaching, which are usually happening, and again, strong events. The major bleachings were 1998 and 2002 in Great Barrier Reef, where you saw mass bleaching, so a lot of corals were affected. Of course, many of those corals were covered, but slowly some haven't, in some, in specific areas. So what they look at is they look at the rate of coral cover and how that's decayed over time, or how the mortality has actually hit over time. And one study really noticed that overall, if you look at the entire Great Barrier Reef, overall coral cover hasn't really changed, it's kind of stayed the same. When you look at the entire Great Barrier Reef, which spans quite a bit, if you're in the States, if you're, or North America, which many of the listeners are, if you look at the length, the actual length, in Australia, of the Great Barrier Reef, it actually works out to being from Washington State, the top of Washington State, all the way down to California. That's the span of the length of the coral of the Great Barrier Reef. Now, the Great Barrier Reef, there's some certain things you need to know. It's got inner coral reef, a midsection coral reef, and an outer coral reef. What those are, those are basically where they are in terms of closeness to shore, distance from shore. So, the inner ones are really up near the shore, the middle, and then, of course, the outer parts are further away from the shore. So, you have to think about that, and how that affects, because what happens is these natural disasters come through, like cyclones, you get invasive species, and you get these coral bleaching, which are events in time that happen, and hopefully they don't have them for too long, right? But then what happens is, and then, normally on a natural level, the coral reefs can recover from that. But the closer you are into shore, the more affected you are from human impacts. So, water quality, so temperature, sedimentation, so the amount of coastal development that's going on, agriculture runoff, nutrients, all that kind of stuff can affect from the other side, from the coastal side. And so, the inner coral reefs, the inner barrier reefs that are close to shore, actually get more affected by the reefs, or by the pollution, and by all these disasters, because they don't have time to recover, because they're always working on recovery. They're always working to be resilient against these different influences, whether they're natural or not. And, of course, with climate change, the amount of cyclones that hit have increased in the past 20 years. So, we're getting more strong storm events. So, with all that together, all that accumulated, we call cumulative impacts here in the science world, it gets affected. We get affected by these species. They get affected. They don't have time to recover. They're not resilient. They don't have time to recover from these disasters, because they're always recovering for something, or they're always being affected by something. So, the management kind of focus is to take away the human aspect and see what will happen. So, there is a couple of predictions of what happens if you take away the human aspect. So, some modeling was done, and then notice that once you take the human aspect out, you actually get more recovery. You actually get better recovery from the natural disasters. So, that's something from a management point of view. It's like, okay, let's regulate the runoff, the water quality, so that these areas can can recoup faster. And, of course, there will be an you know, the outer reefs are not as affected from the human dynamics as the inner reefs. Of course, the middle reefs are sort of intermediate, of course, because they're in the middle. They're still close to shore, so they get affected just lightly. But that's where the focus will be in the future for management, because of these studies, right? Now, as I said before, over the entire like 30-year period that we have some data sets, there hasn't been, once they show that there hasn't been that much of a change over the entire Great Barrier Reef. But, the reef has sub-regions because it's so long. And in six of the sub-regions, the coral cover actually increased, and seven of those sub-regions, the coral cover decreased. Different dynamics, different effects, probably different kinds of reefs, they all get affected differently. Cyclones hit in specific areas. There's certain rates of cyclone chances and risks. So, that all has to be calculated and figured out of what those risks are to these coral covers. But this is, I want to kind of break down this, I want to give you that knowledge for the research papers that I've been reading, because this is what happens, right? We have cumulative impacts. You try and take away the stuff that we can control, allow the stuff that you can control to happen, but the recovery can happen more. You take away more of the disturbances, the faster the reefs will recover. And they notice that that actually happens. The reefs do recover. Now, a lot of these studies don't take into account ocean acidification, which is really big on reefs because ocean acidification takes away the coral's ability to build a skeleton by taking away the amount of calcium carbonate in the water. Of course, you know, reefs or corals use calcium carbonate to build their skeleton. It's a calcium-based skeleton. And because they can't, they don't have that, there's not much available because of ocean acidification, because of lower pH, that will affect the ability to recoup. So, there's that aspect that hasn't been used in a lot of these studies, but more and more studies are looking at ocean acidification, how that can be reduced, or how it's affecting the corals. So, lots of stuff to go on in the Great Barrier Reef. There's a lot of threats, but it's also nice to know that they can recover if a lot of the threats that can be controlled are taken out or regulated properly. Now, there are some effects of population increase, human population increase along the coast of the Great Barrier Reef, because it's so popular and it's such a beautiful place to live. More and more people are moving there, more people are living in that area. However, that's going to affect the human aspect. So, regulators of government have to really get on that aspect and make sure that the disturbance cause is minimal and that it won't affect the reefs, it'll allow the reefs to recoup. So, that's all for what I was going to talk about in terms of the research. I will link to some of the papers that I've been reading, and you can take a look for yourself if you'd like. There's some pretty interesting images there. If you don't understand the statistics behind it, it's not a big problem. When I look at a paper, I read the introduction and discussion, which really covers the message of the paper, and then I go down and deeper because I like the math. I go into deeper and look at the math. So, I encourage you to read those papers. They're available online and you can take a look and read those right now. So, thank you very much. The show notes for this will be SpeakUpForBlue.com, forward slash session 100, because this is our 100th episode, and thank you for listening. I really appreciate it. If you want to support our podcast, you can do so by going to SpeakUpForBlue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N, and you can put in a monthly support of any amount you really want, minimum of a dollar, and every month it will be taken out. It allows us to, one, buy the equipment that makes the sound of the podcast sound better. It allows us to explore different avenues. We want to eventually include video into that, a digital magazine. We really want to grow this message. The idea for all these different platforms, these technical platforms, is to grow our message, is to make sure our message reaches everybody, and people who want to change. If we can get people like Graham and Darlene on the podcast, listening to the podcast, who want to change, once they hear that there's a problem, or want to teach others to change, or how they can change, or where they can get their information. That's the point of this podcast, is to get the ocean conservation message out there and allow people to make informed decisions on the way they live, and hopefully we'll decide to live for a better ocean. So, thank you very much for listening to the podcast. You have been listening to SpeakUpForBlue podcast. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, and thank you for listening to our 100th episode, and also the 99 that preceded it. I really appreciate it. My name is Andrew Lewin. I'm the host of SpeakUpForBlue podcast. Happy Thursday, and happy conservation. [Music]