The Great Barrier Reef- resistant coral

[Puddleduck]

Originally Posted by Dave_S

Will this be another cane toad or crown of thorns mistake?.

Crown of thorns starfish naturally and happily occur on coral reefs. It’s only the unhealthy, damaged and less diverse coral reefs where starfish population explosions become a problem. Mainly because the starfishes predators have all been eaten by hungry people!

[Reefmagnet]

Originally Posted by Puddleduck

Crown of thorns starfish naturally and happily occur on coral reefs. It’s only the unhealthy, damaged and less diverse coral reefs where starfish population explosions become a problem. Mainly because the starfishes predators have all been eaten by hungry people!

And they can't blame climate change for crown of thorns either. They were in plagues in the 70's

[RaymondR]

Much of, and perhaps all the carbonate components, of those zillions of tons of carbonate rocks and reefs were once CO2 in the atmosphere. Algae and reef builders combined the carbon component with minerals from the sea water to form the carbonate rocks and reefs. With the very high concentrations of CO2 in sea water (the atmosphere had up to around 7,000 ppm and consequently acidification must have been severe) why would not these same processes cause a carbonate reef and rock building spree?

[SailOar]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

Much of, and perhaps all the carbonate components, of those zillions of tons of carbonate rocks and reefs were once CO2 in the atmosphere. Algae and reef builders combined the carbon component with minerals from the sea water to form the carbonate rocks and reefs. With the very high concentrations of CO2 in sea water (the atmosphere had up to around 7,000 ppm and consequently acidification must have been severe) why would not these same processes cause a carbonate reef and rock building spree?

As I understand it, it will, eventually, but only after major changes in the coral, shellfish, and diatom communities.

Most current calcium-using ocean organisms favor the use of Aragonite, because of the ocean's high Mg/Ca ratio. In past eras, with warmer seas, higher CO2 levels, and lower Mg/Ca ratios, Calcite was the favored building material. The current ocean changes are too quick for many species to adapt to.


Great Barrier Reef Part 3: Acidification, Warming, and Past Coral Survival


Calcite vs Aragonite


Why were the ancient oceans favorable to marine life when atmospheric carbon dioxide was higher than today?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcite_sea

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aragonite_sea

[Puddleduck]

Originally Posted by Reefmagnet

And they can't blame climate change for crown of thorns either. They were in plagues in the 70's

Ah yes the 70’s, when people use to chop up crown of thorns into little pieces to get rid of them. Of coarse starfish are capable of vegative reproduction.

Nothing to do with climate change....

[Dave_S]

This is a Facebook thing so highly trustworthy, but thought I'd put it up for comments.

https://m.facebook.com/CraigKellyMP/...pe=3&source=48

[Puddleduck]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

Much of, and perhaps all the carbonate components, of those zillions of tons of carbonate rocks and reefs were once CO2 in the atmosphere. Algae and reef builders combined the carbon component with minerals from the sea water to form the carbonate rocks and reefs. With the very high concentrations of CO2 in sea water (the atmosphere had up to around 7,000 ppm and consequently acidification must have been severe) why would not these same processes cause a carbonate reef and rock building spree?

Yeh I don’t have the answers that your not looking for!

The relationship and complexity between coral polyps, coral colonies, zooxanthallae, bacterial communities, water chemistry, photosynthetically availible radiation, turbidity, water flow, zooplankton and phytoplankton availability, commensal and symbiotic relationship both micro and macro, predation and other associated species and relationships.....aren’t fully understood today. Anyone commenting on what happend and why some 50 million years ago is only speculating and the main reason I focus most of my efforts on today!

so here’s my own speculation.....
At some points in history there was probably a sweet spot where all the parameters above aligned causing a coral growth boom... before a big bust, something quite common in nature. We’re in a biodiversity extinction cycle at the moment (no mention of cause here although I’ve personal seen enough to form my own opinion )

I could speculate further....
Once apon a time elevated co2 caused supersaturation of availible minerals for calcification and stabilising aquatic pH temporarily until a tipping point where the oceans buffering capacity was exhausted causing a sharp drop in pH killing most scleractinian corals. This would be quickly succeeded by massive algal blooms, better yet Cyanobacteria (high DOCs, temps and dissolved co2) further exasibating pH fluctuations through dinural respiration, reducing light penetration and killing most complex sessile life in the oceans. Of coarse after all the dissolved organic compounds have been mopped up by the algae they’ll too go through mass die off leaving only microbial sessile life to start the evolution process once again. There might be a few isolated communities that survive who knows or it might only take a couple of million years to get to a stage where complex multicellular life can thrive in the oceans again....Who know? Catastrophist, maybe but I’ll leave the name calling to the politicians.

There’s hardly a single spot on this planet today that hasn’t been touched in some way by human activity. Time to put those monkey brains to use, other than benefiting just team homosapien. Individuals coral polyps can grow into huge communities, individual colonial consisting of 100,000’s individual polyps all sharing and working together to benefit their colonial community while living mainly off of water and sunlight while providing a habitat for so many more species. Coral reefs ARE disappearing and regardless of the cause, I’ll be doing what I can to stop it.

[Puddleduck]

Originally Posted by Dave_S

This is a Facebook thing so highly trustworthy, but thought I'd put it up for comments.

https://m.facebook.com/CraigKellyMP/...pe=3&source=48

Why?

Posted by a politician. Must be an honest, respected member of the community...not like those ‘other politicians’, say no more! The post is loaded, misinformation formed into easily digestible sound bites targeted at an audience who want to hear what’s being said, don’t really understand and don’t want to learn. Election fodder or fundraising?


Ah I get it now, your just trolling

With all due respect, judging from your posts you don’t seem to really have an understanding of corals and don’t realy seem interested apart from pushing an agenda!

I’m off to suck on a car exhaust, I read a FB post by an investment banker with shares in GSK it’s good for Morality

[Reefmagnet]

Originally Posted by Dave_S

This is a Facebook thing so highly trustworthy, but thought I'd put it up for comments.

https://m.facebook.com/CraigKellyMP/...pe=3&source=48

For those that don't FB

CRYING WOLF OVER THE GREAT BARRIER : THE LAST VESTIGE OF GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISM

Professor Peter Ridd sets out THE SCIENCE of the Great Barrier Reef ..........

Scientists from James Cook University have just published a paper on the bleaching and death of corals on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and were surprised that the death rate was less than they expected because of the ADAPTABILITY OF CORALS TO CHANGING TEMPERATURES.

It appears as though they exaggerated their original claims and are quietly backtracking. To misquote Oscar Wilde, to exaggerate once is a misfortune, to do it twice looks like carelessness, but to do it repeatedly looks like unforgivable systemic unreliability by some of our major science organisations.

It is a well-known phenomenon that corals can adapt very rapidly to high temperatures and that if you heat corals in one year, they tend to be less susceptible in future years to overheating. It is the reason why CORALS ARE ONE OF THE LEAST LIKELY SPECIES TO BE AFFECTED BY CLIMATE CHANGE, irrespective of whether you believe the climate is changing by natural fluctuations or from human influence.

Corals have a unique way of dealing with changing temperature by changing the microscopic plants that live inside them. These microscopic plants called zooxanthellae give the coral energy from the sun by photosynthesis in exchange for a comfortable home inside the coral. But when the water gets hot, these little plants become effectively poisonous to the coral and the coral throws out the plants turning the coral white – it bleaches. But most of the time THE CORAL WILL RECOVER FROM THE BLEACHING.

And here’s their trick- they take in new zooxanthellae, that floats around in the water quite naturally, and can select different species of zooxanthellae to be better suited to hot weather.

Most other organisms have to change their genetic makeup to deal with temperature changes, something that can take many generations. But corals can do it in a few weeks by just changing the plants that live inside them. They have learnt a thing or two in a couple of hundred years of evolution.

The problem here is that the world has been COMPLETELY MISLEAD by scientists about the affect of bleaching and rarely mention the spectacular regrowth that occurs. For example, the 2016 bleaching event supposedly killed either 95%, 50% or 30% of the reef depending upon which headline and scientist you want to believe.

But the scientists only looked at very shallow water coral – less than 2 meters below the surface which is only a small fraction of all the coral, but by far the most susceptible to getting hot in the tropical sun. A recent study found that the deep water coral (down to over 40 m) got far less bleaching as one would expect. I estimate that less than 8% of the GBR coral actually died. That might still sound like a lot, but considering that there was a 250% INCREASE IN CORAL between 2011 and 2016 for the entire Southern Zone of the GBR, an 8% decrease is nothing to worry about. CORAL RECOVERS FAST.

But this is just the tip of the exaggeration iceberg. Some very eminent scientists claim that bleaching never happened before the 1980’s and is entirely a man-made phenomenon. This was always a ridiculous proposition. A recent study of 400-year-old corals has found that BLEACHING HAS ALWAYS OCCURRED AND IS NO MORE COMMON MORE AND IS NO MORE COMMON NOW THAN IN THE PAST.

Scientist have also claimed that there has been a 15% reduction in the growth rate of corals. However, some colleagues and I demonstrated that there were serious errors in their work and that if anything there has been a slight INCREASE IN THE CORAL GROWTH RATE OVER THE LAST 100 YEARS. This is what one would expect in a gently warming climate. Corals grow up to twice as fast in the hotter water of Papua New Guinea and the northern GBR than in the southern GBR. I could go on with many more examples.

This unreliability of the science is now a widely accepted scandal in many other areas of study and now has a name. “The Replication Crisis”. When checks are made to replicate or confirm scientific results, it is regularly found that around half has flaws. This is an incredible and scandalous situation and it is not just me saying this – it is the editors of eminent journals and many science institutions. A great deal of effort is now going into fixing this problem especially in the Biomedical Sciences where the problem was first recognised.

But not for GBR science. The science institutions deny there is a problem and fail to correct erroneous work. When Piers Larcombe and I wrote an article to a scientific journal suggesting we needed a little extra checking of GBR science, the response from many very eminent scientists was that there was no need. Everything is fine. I am not sure if this is blind optimism or wilful negligence, but why would anybody object to a little more checking? It would only cost a few million dollars, just a tiny fraction of what the governments will be spending on the reef.

But the truth will out eventually.

The scare stories about the GBR started in the 1960’s when scientist first started work on the reef. They have been crying wolf ever since.

But the data keeps coming in and, yes, sometimes a great deal of coral dies in a spectacular manner with accompanying media fanfare. It is like a bushfire on land, it looks terrible at first, but it quietly and RAPIDLY GROWS BACK AGAIN ready for the scientists to peddle their story all over again.

That article above certainly agrees with my direct observations.

[Puddleduck]

Originally Posted by Puddleduck

Why?

Posted by a politician. Must be an honest, respected member of the community...not like those ‘other politicians’, say no more!

Oh wait no...

Before his election, Kelly was a....small business owner in the manufacturing and trade sector. In 2012, Kelly was referred to the parliamentary privileges committee over a range of allegations, including a failure to declare on his register of interests his directorship of several companies.[9]

.....

Tobacco tax

Kelly has stated that government taxes on tobacco are driving the creation of a black market.[56] own shares in tobacco too Kelly?

[Reefmagnet]

Originally Posted by Puddleduck

Why?

Posted by a politician. Must be an honest, respected member of the community...not like those ‘other politicians’, say no more! The post is loaded, misinformation formed into easily digestible sound bites targeted at an audience who want to hear what’s being said, don’t really understand and don’t want to learn. Election fodder or fundraising?


Ah I get it now, your just trolling

With all due respect, judging from your posts you don’t seem to really have an understanding of corals and don’t realy seem interested apart from pushing an agenda!

I’m off to suck on a car exhaust, I read a FB post by an investment banker with shares in GSK it’s good for Morality

Whoa! Before shooting the messenger, you should actually read the article. It's obvious you didn't, because the "honest" politician is quoting Peter Ridd; A scientist who values truth in science over paychecks.


http://blackjay.net/wp-content/uploa...s-2017-IPA.pdf


https://ipa.org.au/publications-ipa/...ing-outrageous

[Reefmagnet]

Originally Posted by Puddleduck

Oh wait no...

Before his election, Kelly was a....small business owner in the manufacturing and trade sector. In 2012, Kelly was referred to the parliamentary privileges committee over a range of allegations, including a failure to declare on his register of interests his directorship of several companies.[9]

.....

Tobacco tax

Kelly has stated that government taxes on tobacco are driving the creation of a black market.[56] own shares in tobacco too Kelly?

And I bet the mongrel dog tortures kittens when no one is looking, too.

[Puddleduck]

Originally Posted by Reefmagnet

For those that don't FB





That article above certainly agrees with my direct observations.

What are your observations please?

[Puddleduck]

Originally Posted by Reefmagnet

And I bet the mongrel dog tortures kittens when no one is looking, too.

Yep, I read that on FB too, have you got the link?

[Reefmagnet]

Originally Posted by Puddleduck

What are your observations please?

My observations are that the reef is doing just fine.