RMIT University claim that I have misrepresented the state of the corals at John Brewer Reef – if not the entire Great Barrier Reef.

They have come to this conclusion not by visiting John Brewer Reef. If they had visited the coral reef they would have found, as I did, a coral wonderland. Instead their ‘fact check’ article, being published across Facebook, is pure propaganda.

Fundamental to science is observation and the closer-up the better. Anyone who actually visited John Brewer Reef during the period it was reported as badly bleached would have found an unusually colourful coral reef.

I first visited John Brewer reef on 10th and 12th April when it was purportedly at its worst, and I have never seen a more colourful reef in all my fifty years of diving at the Great Barrier Reef.

The reef crest was especially spectacular with normally chocolate brown corals transitioning to pink.

The pink colour was from a protein produced by the coral polyp in response to the higher temperatures experienced during February 2022. As I show in my new film A Coral Bleaching Tragedy, corals have been bleaching colourful, a phenomenon also known as fluorescing, since at least the 1970s and probably for the last few thousand years that is the age of the modern Great Barrier Reef.

Most people would prefer their corals pink, rather than beige. Yet, such brightly coloured corals may be so stressed they are hardly growing at all. It is a little-known fact that many corals become colourful when they are stressed.

Most corals at reefs around the world are their healthiest when they are beige in colour. Many beige-coloured corals have naturally florescent tips.

The nonsense article written by Eiddwen Jeffery and published by RMIT University begins with the title: ‘Free Market Think Tank Tries to Whitewash Coral Bleaching Claims’.

No. My central thesis is that the corals at John Brewer Reef were bleaching colourful.

Yes – Colourful!

It is such a pity that our universities, Facebook, and the popular press are so concerned with keeping-up appearances – by which I mean continuing to publish misinformation suggesting that places like John Brewer Reef that are home to the Museum of Underwater Art (MOUA) are stark white when this is not the case and has never been the case.

The whitewash is unfortunate because it maligns the still beautiful Great Barrier Reef. I consider it an absolute travesty that an organisation in distant Melbourne (RMIT University) can so make stuff-up about John Brewer Reef in North Queensland, with the information promulgated by the multinational corporation Meta. I suspect that the author, Eiddwen Jeffery, is little more than one of their ‘useful idiots’ and I suspect she has never had the opportunity to submerge herself in the crystal clear warm waters or see all the colourful fishes.

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The photograph of the blue coral and yellow fish that features at the top of this blog post was taken at John Brewer Reef on 10th April 2022 by Jennifer Marohasy with an Olympus TG6.

To know when the next instalment of this saga is published subscribe at https://jennifermarohasy.com/subscribe/

Then you will also know when my new film, which is all about John Brewer Reef, is next in a cinema near you.

To learn more about colourful bleaching you can read:
Volume 30, Issue 13, 6 July 2020, Pages 2433-2445 of
Optical Feedback Loop Involving Dinoflagellate Symbiont and Scleractinian Host Drives Colorful Coral Bleaching
By Elena Bollati et al.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.04.055

The article’s highlights include:
1. Colourful bleaching is a recurring phenomenon in reef regions around the globe
2. Colours result from blue-light-driven host pigment upregulation following bleaching
3. Photoprotective host pigments in bleached tissue can aid symbiont recolonization
4. Colourful bleaching can be indicative of brief or mild heat and/or nutrient stress

Thanks for reading this far.