In deep de-stress

Plunge deep into the tepid, turquoise waters, and suddenly there is silence; a serenity unlike anything on shore, and yet there is a heightened sense of mystery. Will the fluorescent-orange clownfish make an appearance? What is the protocol when a hammerhead shark circles you ? That’s the allure of scuba diving in Queensland, Australia. You never know what you will come across in the world’s most diverse aquarium: the Great Barrier Reef (GBR).

The GBR is a collection of over 900 islands and over 2,500 individual reefs, covering 3,44,400 sq km approximately. It contains one-third of the world’s soft corals, 411 types of hard corals, 1,500 species of fish, 134 species of sharks and rays, six of the seven threatened species of marine turtles, and more than 30 species of marine mammals, including the vulnerable dugong.

Swimming alongside dolphins, catching a glimpse of a humpback whale, watching Olive Ridley hatchlings emerge from the shells, marvelling at the colours of coral colonies, is what made Peter Gash, an avid scuba diver, go from pilot to conservationist. Sometime in the ’90’s, Gash, who used to fly tourists to Lady Elliot, an island in the GBR, “fell in love with her”. He says, “From the first time I saw Lady Elliot, I wanted her, so when the lease was up for grabs, I took it up.”

Back then, few would have been interested in this Lady — incidentally the island is named after the wife of Hugh Elliot, a governor in India — because she was literally full of shit. Around 6,000 years ago, the coral reefs beneath the island began to grow upward, eventually creating the cay. Not suitable for vegetation, it was however useful to birds. In time, the 100-odd acre island earned the tag of ‘Australia’s biggest toilet’. The bird droppings contained nutrients, and facilitated the island’s vegetation. They hardened together with the sediments such that the island is almost equal parts coral and poop.

Sometime in the mid-1800’s, guano became much sought-after as manure and an ingredient for gunpowder. And Lady Elliot was stripped bare of the resource, and the biodiversity that grew from it. Don Adams, an aviator, and Gash’s predecessor who founded the Lady Elliot Island Eco-resort, put the landing strip on the island, and started a revegetation programme in 1969. Gash says, “When I first took on the island in 2005, Lady Elliott used 550 litres of diesel daily, just to produce power.” The greenhouse gas emissions worried him. Warmer air temperature affects the chemistry of oceans. Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air makes the waters acidic and this destroys the calcium carbonate, the substance that shapes the skeletons of hard corals. The rising heat also causes algae in the coral tissues to die, leading to coral bleaching.

Man to the rescue: Peter Gash is among the first names in the list of reef warriors

While corals can sometimes recover, prolonged environmental stress causes death. So the ‘reef warrior’ set out to work. Gash began the first of many transformations on the eco-resort: Solar power to reduce the island’s carbon footprint. Under his aegis, in 2008, the island received its solar hybrid power station. Several improvements and additions later, Gash says proudly, “Today it is 80 per cent solar powered. We’re aiming for 100 per cent by 2020.” The island treats its sewage and produces water through a desalination system.

Little wonder that the island is the first ‘climate change ark’ of the Reef Islands Initiative 2018, established by the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. The programme is set to develop detailed resilience and habitat maps of Lady Elliott and adjoining reefs; pilot novel technologies such as acoustics, underwater drones and automated vehicles, and use thermal imaging for the purpose.

The Foundation has also recently come up with some quirky initiatives to restore the reef. It funded a study led by Professor Peter Harrison of Southern Cross University, where he and his team performed ‘IVF on the reef’. Corals are notoriously bad at sex: they mate once a year. Considering they can’t actually move, how do they reproduce? Here’s how: annually, on cues from the lunar cycle, when the water temperature is just right, coral colonies release tiny eggs and sperms, called gametes, which float around and find each other.

During the November 2016 spawning, the team travelled to Heron Island in the GBR, collected eggs and sperm; used them to grow over a million larvae in labs; then transported those back to the reef. More recently, the team went back and found that the experiment had worked, with over 100 surviving juvenile corals established on the settlement tiles of the reef. “Our work shows that adding higher densities of coral larvae leads to higher numbers of successful coral recruits,” says Harrison.

Yet another recent innovation combats coral bleaching: A sun shield developed by scientists at the University of Melbourne and the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences. The shield is 50,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair. Much like coral-skeletons, it is made up of calcium carbonate. “While it is still early days, and the trials have been on a small scale, the result shows the film reduced light by up to 30 per cent,” says Anna Marsden, managing director, Great Barrier Reef Foundation.

Even as ‘environmental challenges’, ‘climate change’ become the buzzwords of our times, Gash reminds us that we can all contribute to save the environment. He says, “Remember, what you do in Mumbai could go a long way in protecting the GBR, and vice-versa; we are all connected; we are all one.”

Kiran Mehta is a Mumbai-based freelance writer

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