New research has found that certain parts of the Great Barrier Reef might offer opportunities for regeneration of most of the reef

We are constantly hearing about the coral bleaching that is happening all over the world, where corals are heated by the increased global temperature, and ends up killing the symbiont that lives within the polyp. This is bad news, and over just a few years a whole reef can die from the bleaching, and we don’t really have any way to prevent this from happening. An estimated 70 % of the shallow water corals in the Great Barrier Reef have already died, and there’s no reason to think this trend will stop anytime soon.

Corals in the Great Barrier Reef. Image by Toby Hudson, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

We are often told that the entire Great Barrier Reef (shortened GBR) is doomed to die from bleaching unless we take immediate action to stop the global warming, and this seemed like what would happen. Luckily new research has shown us that this might not be the case, and that the coral reef might just be able to regenerate on its own after a bleaching event kills most of it.

The GBR consists of over 3,800 individual reefs that all have their own ecosystem. The problems the reefs are facing tend to spread from one of these reefs to the next, but new research from University of Queensland, CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, and the University of Sheffield have found 100 reefs that might act as a “failsafe” in cases where most of the other reefs die.

The reasons why these reefs are of such importance is because they all lie in areas that are cool, and should not be affected by bleaching events. This allows them to reproduce and supply larvae to other nearby reefs in the future. Many of them are also located in areas close to ocean currents that can take larvae from these healthy reefs into reefs far away, and are thus able to regenerate most of the Great Barrier Reef even after most of it has died.

These 100 reefs only make up 3 % of the entire GBR, but they should be able to supply larvae to 45 % of the entire GBR. This means that far from the entire Great Barrier Reef will be able to be regenerated, but almost half of it is a lot better than the other futures that have been predicted for it!

Bleached corals. Not as beautiful as the corals in the first picture! Image by Acropora at English Wikipedia.

Does this mean we should not worry about the reef anymore?

Absolutely not. We should still focus efforts on taking care of both the Great Barrier reef as well as all other reefs who are facing problems today, because we have no insurance that these regeneration-parts even work. It’s just a theory at this point, and it might take very long time before the reef will become healthy again. It is always best to take care of what we got in the first place, instead of trying to fix it after it is broken, so the problems with the coral bleaching should still be taken just as seriously.

Thanks for reading

I linked to the paper earlier in the post, but here it is again if you missed it. It’s a very interesting read on the Great Barrier Reef. Anyway, thank you very much for checking out my post! Feel free to leave a comment below if you got anything you want to add.