Picture by Denise Lamby

Story by James Woodford

As the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority warns that this summer is shaping up as a shocker for coral bleaching it’s a good time to review three new publications.

All three deal with one of Australia’s most important World Heritage areas and the threats it faces.
Firstly, last week an incredible book was published by the CSIRO -  The Great Barrier Reef: Biology, Environment and Management. All proceeds from sales will go to the Australian Coral Reef Society.
Pulled together by the Australian Museum’s Pat Hutchings, University of Queensland’s Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and Mike Kingsford from James Cook Uni, its aim is to capture the marine park as an ecosystem rather than simply a great coral wall.

It is a comprehensive guidebook to the reef, in which coral is just one of the actors – seaweed, sponges, oceanography, seabirds, marine mammals, fish and even worms get a jersey.
The doom and gloom is there but more than anything it is a detailed stocktake of one of the planet’s most extraordinary ecosystems.
Pat Hutchings was also a co-author of a new scientific paper, Beyond Corals and Fish, published in Global Change Biology, which is a quiet appeal for the broader biodiversity of the reef to be recognised. The coral is always what the millions of visitors to the reef want to paparazzi but Hutchings and her colleagues are warning that we overlook invertebrates and other creatures at our peril.
“Climate change will herald environmental changes that may have profound impacts on all benthic invertebrates, including major events such as range extensions and extinctions.”
At stake, the authors warn, is the entire food web of the reef.
The third publication is a detailed, timely and surprisingly readable study of coral bleaching by two Australian Institute of Marine Science researchers, Janice Lough and Madeleine van Oppen. Their book Coral Bleaching: patterns, processes, causes and consequences paints a more complicated story of reef destruction than brief media reports can convey. While their prognosis is grim, there is hope in what we do not yet know, particularly on how corals may adapt to climate change.
“There is still much to learn and, unfortunately, many of the experiments are happening in real time in the real world,” Lough and van Oppen write.