Renowned coral reef researcher Professor Callum Roberts from the University of Exeter in the UK often talks about a phenomenon called ‘shifting baseline syndrome’:

This tendency renders each new generation blind to past losses, setting their personal baseline of normality by what they first find.
In Reef Life, An Underwater Memoir

Out of sight, out of mind

With his words metaphorically ringing in my ears, I have pushed on, documenting Norfolk Island’s reef for four solid years, although I’ve been swimming around and over it for a good deal more time than that. My images from this effort are that baseline, an insurance policy, so we don’t forget what we once had on our reef.

All told, I’ve lived on Norfolk Island more than ten years, swimming almost every day. A great deal has changed since I first visited the reef in the mid-1990s. Then, underwater cameras were a luxury item and film was expensive, consequently, I have no records from that time. I just have my own impression – my anecdotal observations – that it has degraded a great deal.

Having said that, by drawing a line in Emily Bay’s sands four years ago, and aided by cheap, reliable camera technology and the ability to take as many photos as I want, I now have a library in excess of 100,000 records, either as video or as still photos. These are all catalogued into an array of folders and subfolders so that, relatively easily, I can go back and find a particular coral and then compare it with what it looks like today, or I can pinpoint when I last saw a particular fish.

One of the issues for our marine habitats, globally, is that they are largely out of sight to most people. Even those who are regular swimmers or divers in our marine environment are bewildered by the incredible ecosystem out there. So, as Norfolk Island’s reef continues to deteriorate, which it will unless we change tack, I will continue to keep shining a huge football-stadium sized spotlight on it via this website and, more importantly, via my Norfolk Island Time Facebook and Instagram (@norfolkislandtime) pages.

Social media rules!

Incidentally, these aforementioned social media pages reached 2,791,406 people in 2023 alone, and that was quiet compared to the previous year where one particular video took off like a Screeching Demon at a fireworks display! A lot of readers love the island and are interested in the environment here and how we relate to it. Hopefully, just a few are learning something new and fascinating about our underwater world, or are being encouraged to study it. I see education as being the only way it will get the respect it deserves.

The report card

The report card for 2023 looks much the same as it did in 2022, and 2021, so I’ll save myself the bother of recapping and refer you to the 2022 Year in Review post. The toxic blue-green algae, lyngbya, is still out there in abundance, as is the white syndrome that is killing the corals one colony at a time, and we still have plentiful algae overgrowing the dead and dying corals.

The following articles from 2023 may be of interest to those who want more information:

• The journey from coral reef to rubble

• The spatiotemporal dynamics of a coral disease

• For the sake of our grandchildren

• Tiptoeing through government silos

• We can’t say we weren’t warned

• Phase shifts and biodiversity

• You don’t always know what you’ve got – til it’s gone

• Draining the swamp

• No coral? No butterflyfish!

• The camera doesn’t lie – looking back over three years of observations

When being interviewed this year by a group of people for a particular, let’s call it, ‘funding opportunity’, one of the questions I had levelled at me (which was rhetorical, as they didn’t really want an answer) was had I seen the Utopia episode that had aired the previous week about the Great Barrier Reef (click on the YouTube, right, to watch the short clip). Before I had chance to answer, the questioner added that the Great Barrier Reef Authority has pots of money, so why don’t I just investigate what they are doing there to address their water quality issues. I got the impression he thought I was going to spend his organisation’s funds on a whizzbang new office set up, or a grand floating palace from which to launch research missions. Never mind that we are a tiny inshore reef directly abutting a human settlement, with certain historical peculiarities that have caused the issues, all located 1,500 km away from the eastern coast of Australia. We are also rather a long way from the GBR, which incidentally is for the most part anywhere between 16 km and 160 km off the coast. We don’t even have a 16-metre buffer!

I think the above ‘episode’ taught me a great deal. It served to highlight the misunderstandings held by many about Norfolk Island and its place in the greater scheme of things, certainly in terms of its environmental management. We are tiny and we are isolated, and as I often comment, we tend to get forgotten. But does that make us insignificant? I don’t believe so.

Nothing I’ve said here is a criticism of our Marine Parks. Unfortunately, the big-ticket parks, like the GBR, get the lion’s share of the funding, leaving other areas somewhat under-resourced. Here on Norfolk Island, we are lucky enough to have a returning team of coral reef health scientists monitoring our reef over a period of years. Not that monitoring it actually helps the onshore issues causing the problem a whole lot, but it does highlight them. And at least we have the science to back any ‘anecdotal observations’. My frustration stems from not being able to approach the care for Norfolk Island’s environment holistically, as an interconnected ecosystem that doesn’t defer to government silos.

Of note

Moving along, and looking back through my records, there are a few noteworthy observations that I feel would be worth investigating further. (NB The fish I’ve chosen to single out here are all ones that I would see regularly, not the ‘one offs’ or occasional visitors that find themselves inside the lagoon.)

I have recorded five species of parrotfish on our inshore reef. Parrotfish are a subspecies of the broader wrasse family. I last spotted each of these species, as follows:

• blue-barred parrotfish (Scarus ghobban): 14 September 2021

• marbled parrotfish (Leptoscarus vaigiensis): 21 September 2021

• Pacific bullethead parrotfish (Chlorurus spilurus): 3 October 2021

• palenose parrotfish (Scarus Psittacus): 20 June 2022

• surf parrotfish (Scarus rivulatus): 12 January 2023 (previously 14 November 2022).

Then there are the peacock damselfish (Pomacentrus pavo, right). I last saw these tiny fish on 28 December 2022. They all (I knew of five individuals) disappeared more or less simultaneously.

I last observed the masked moki (Goniistius francisi, below) on 13 April 2022.

My last example are the bluestreak cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus. left) cleaning stations. When I began observing the reef four years ago there were three individuals that I was aware of, interspersed up and down the reef. I always looked out for them because they fascinated me as I watched the interactions between the different species of fish. Now I know of one. This guy moves around a fair bit in the mid-channel area, and he doesn’t seem to have the same number of customers queued up as the others once had.

Contrary to all the above, and very happily, we had the moorish idols (Zanclus cornutus) reappear around 19 February 2023, after a reported absence since 2017.

Because Norfolk Island’s reef is so intimate, it is possible to see these relatively small kinds of population changes. But here I must stress that I have no idea what is happening, or why. There could be any number of reasons for these changes that only a longitudinal study will uncover. Species come and go, increase in numbers and dwindle, all the time. But when I look at the dates for the disappearances, I do question what is going on.

The Wins

In more positive news, this ‘Out on a swim’ blog, with no organisation behind it, is rated in the Top 20 Coral Reef Blogs in the world by Feedspot! That makes me incredibly proud to be in the company of the likes of the Coral Reef Alliance and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, and many others.

In another small win, the Atlas of Living Australia now recognises iNaturalist* observations for Norfolk Island (and a few other places that were missing around Australia, too!). I lobbied on and off for around 18 months; they listened, and we got a result!

Also in the report card for the last year are three more, previously unrecorded, fish species, taking the number I have recorded to eleven. You can read this post for more information: Black blenny – a new record for Norfolk Island.

Some cool research

My last bit of good reef news is really cool. A student from the Australian National University, Beth O’Sullivan, asked me if she could use some of my coral photos to create 3D-printed coral settlement tiles that she was creating from calcium carbonate. She found that the images from the Australian National University didn’t have quite the detail she needed. She has perfected the recipe for the building material, which is closely aligned to the chemistry of coral skeletons, and which doesn’t disintegrate in seawater. The idea is that these tiles are placed in the environment at around spawning time and provide a place for corals to latch on and grow. Currently, most are made of concrete, so her original idea is an interesting departure from that. She has been awarded a University Medal for her research. And I am just pleased as punch to have had some teeny little involvement in it all.

Thank you for reading this far, and for being interested in Norfolk Island’s reef. I plan to keep up the swimming and observing throughout 2024; you are welcome to check in to this blog anytime or follow my Facebook and Instagram pages for news on what is happening under the waves.

 *I’ve linked to my personal iNaturalist page.