Day 1 – March focus on Norfolk Island’s reef

Introduction

I have been photographing Norfolk Island’s reef for more than three years. Before I began this project I had no idea what I was looking at, how to use my camera, or even any idea where this I was heading as I began to take photos. All I knew is I wanted to record what was happening because, to my eyes and having returned to the island after a long absence, the reef didn’t look as good as I remembered.

Don’t get me wrong, it still looked good. But something wasn’t right and I didn’t know what that was.

I quickly realised that the reef is often overlooked in favour of our terrestrial wildlife and ecosystems. I wanted to show people what an amazing place it is.

I wondered what would be the best way to interpret the reef for the casual observer – in the spare time I had outside my full-time work and with limited resources. So that became my task: to find out and show people our awesome marine environment right on our doorstep. In the process I created this website, and the blog posts began.

Along the way I discovered that my hunch about the reef not looking as good as it had before was correct. I became aware of the problems facing Norfolk Island’s reef – in common with many reefs worldwide – and aware that my grandson would in all likelihood be unable to enjoy what I had shown his mother when she was growing up on Norfolk Island.

In short, and unintentionally, I became an advocate for the reef.

Fast forward to the end of February 2023 when I was sorting and cataloguing my latest batch of images. I realised that looking back over my observations I had a unique library of some 80,000 images recording what has been happening in our bays. But my memory goes back much further than that – long before I had a camera to take with me on my swims – to 1996 when I first began swimming almost every day in Norfolk Island’s beautiful coral-reefed lagoons.

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. Reef Life, An Underwater Memoir

With his words in mind, I thought I’d spend March featuring one post a day highlighting the reef and lagoonal ecosystems. There are so many wonderful things to see that it would be a travesty to dwell purely on the problems. Having said that, if we don’t wake up and do something fast, we will lose this wonderful habitat.

You can go back through the stories on this blog to find some wonderful stories about the reef and its inhabitants; but if you want further background reading specifically about the issues we face, these earlier blog posts are a good place to start:

• Playing the long game: Norfolk Island’s coral reef and lagoons

• The state of play on Norfolk Island’s reef

• Come on in. The water’s fine

• Norfolk Island’s forgotten reef needs help

• A year in review – 2022 on Norfolk Island’s reef

To start my March focus on Norfolk Island’s reef, I thought I would begin with one of our most common coral families – the genus montipora.

Montipora coral

For 1 March I have picked a very simple brown coral – a plate coral from the genus montipora. I love this photo at the top of this post for the shapes described by the edges of the plates. These white edges are where there is new growth but the symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) have not yet been taken up by the new coral polyps. It is the zooxanthellae that give the coral its colour.

To grow and breed every living thing needs energy, which they get by burning food. Corals get much of their food, and therefore energy, from the zooxanthellae, which provide the coral with food they have created by the process known as photosynthesis. In return, the coral polyps provide the zooxanthellae with a protected environment and the nutrients they need to be able to carry out this process.

In the photo (top of the page) you can see that this is a really healthy colony; however, montipora have been very prone to white syndrome in our bays due to the ongoing issues with poor #waterquality; consequently, colonies free from disease like this one are getting harder to find.

In the images (above) you can see the two colour morphs that we have in our lagoons: brown and blue. The blue colour intensifies in winter as the montipora releases some of its symbiotic algae.

The image, right, is of a different colony of montipora with recent signs of white syndrome. The white patches of dead tissue tend to spread, sometimes quite rapidly over the course of a month. The dead tissue will then gradually become a home for algae to settle and grow. All the fish that once lived on and around the coral plates will have to move elsewhere. Sadly, this situation is occuring repeatedly across Norfolk Island’s lagoons.