Interesting to see that just one thread, seems to high-light the catastrophic global disaster,s just waiting around the future,s corner, and just typical of human nature to just ignore it. *8* billion people on the planet, and all will fine lol....its just a matter of time before gen Y world will only be seen in archives of history.

PLANET3

Great to see Walter Starck is still in the game. My personal observations showed that COTS explode in one area & just quickly leave another. I'm no scientist & I don't really see the need of having to be one to realise that the occurrance of COTS is a natural periodic event on the reef. Repeat NATURAL ! Stop worrying about. Take the tourists to another section for a while & let them ruin coral with their sun screens. 400 to 500 litres of sun lotion washing over the coral every day is what has most impact in the bleaching of coral.

Sorry individual, you're wrong on this one.

I used to average 900 tourists a week all taken to one location on Hardy reef. Hardy reef lagoon is about 7000 acres, but we had a pontoon moored to the reef, so it was only a couple of hundred meters of the 100 hundred meters wide strip of fringing reef that got all our tourists.

Depending on the tide, Hardy reef varies from about 10 Ft under water to perhaps 4Ft dry.

On a standard day, with say 220 adult passengers, 200 hundred would marvel at the enormity of this one complex, take a ride in the imitation submarine coral viewing vessel, eat lunch, & sleep the return trip. All that fresh air, & sun, is too much for city folk.

On average, just 20 of them would actually get wet.

On a low tide day, perhaps 10% of trips, when they could walk on the dry reef, about half, or a little less would do so. I disliked those days, I needed an extra deck hand to run a boat the 30Ft to the reef, & an extra hostess just to dab Mercurochrome on the coral cuts. Damned if I know what would work to prevent festering now that is banned, [Damn greenies}. On these days perhaps 30 or so would actually swim.

These were worrying days, as a bobbing head a hundred yards away is hard to see, particularly when it is disappearing off down reef at 3 or 4 knots, with a big spring tidal current.

Now I suppose you know the drying reef is mostly dead coral flat, with usually some dead but jagged bits scattered on top. There is not much to damage, but people seem to fall over on it.

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One of the expert bodies decided that tourists walking on the reef must damage it, & should be banned. We would have loved to see it banned, it was such a nuisance to us.

We accommodated & transported their researchers free for 6 weeks, hoping for a ban, but no such luck. The report stated they could find no difference in the reef adjacent to our instillation, or another bit used by another operator, to the rest of the 18 miles of fringing reef surrounding the lagoon.

That is apart from a small section to the south east, subject to the biggest seas during cyclones, & a bit called the waterfalls, where 3 narrow channels allowed water to run out of the lagoon, when the coral surrounding the lagoon was dry. These waterfalls, & similar channels in the Swains are the most spectacular thing about the reef, unfortunately seen by so few.

So mate, I don't think sunscreen lotion is having much effect on most of the reef, which rarely sees a boat. let alone a tourist. It is fresh water that does most damage to coral. Look at the gaps in the reef around the Fitzroy & Burdekin river mouths, & you will see that.

When I was sailing around areas in the Solomon Islands, & New Guinea, with very doubtful charts, I would look for the largest fresh water outlet, to find a gap in a fringing reef. It was these areas where bleaching regularly occured, even where id did not occur elsewhere.

Just very heavy rainfall during spring tides is enough to dilute the salt in lagoons, & damage coral.

Dr Starck wonders why the Barium peak found in skeleton coral, corresponding to the year 1870, has never again occurred, and why in subsequent decades, Barium content in corals (the reefs near the Burdekin discharge area), have declined, rather than maintaining high levels, as indicators of river catchment soil erosion. A fair question, but regrettably, essentially a red herring, if I may use that turn of phrase.

Several factors come into play, when trying to quantify the scale of erosion / disturbance over time, from the river catchment through to the eventual deposition on the reef. Barium is toxic, but is normally not a problem when absorbed by plants. The rate of Barium uptake by plants tends to significantly increase when soils are acidic - as are most soils in the great cropping regions around Australia - including the Burdekin region. How is this relevent? Land use in the Burdekin region has changed greatly since the late 19th century, when cows were king. Certainly, following on a major drought, the introduction of large cattle herds would have mobilised large amounts of Barium present relatively undisturbed in the previously unfarmed soil. Soil born Barium is generally not very mobile in nature, and minimal plant uptake during the drought, would certainly have resulted in a spike in discharge sediments, when the drought eventually broke.

Now, fast forwarding the calendar to more recent decades, we find that much of the land under discussion here, is host to the largest sugar cane industry in Australia. Sugar is fast growing, and given the aforementioned soil acidity,along with the propensity for enhanced Barium uptake by plants under low pH soil conditions, it is not at all surprising that Barium levels as found in river discharge sediments, are steadily declining.

I confess I havnt read the article, however, I have been sailing the Whitsundays for the past week and was alarmed to what I found.

Firstly, my involvement in the area goes back to my employment days on South Mole Island, in the mis 80's and my wife and I, along with our two children have been a frequent visitor ever since.

What I have noticed during my recent trip.

This is my first sailing trip since the introduction of the controversial GREEN ZONES which have been introduced to protect allocated areas of the reef. Apparently!

So having been snorkeling and spear fishing the area since the mid 80's, I now note there are very limited areas where this can legally occur and, the areas that are not in the green zones, but can be spear fished, are literally under water deserts, suffering from total over fishing, yet were great spear fishing locations back then.

So on the one hand the powers to be have protected some areas, but a heavy cost to others.

How can this make sense I ask!