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#great barrier reef
reasonsforhope · 6 months
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"Any good gardener knows what a good de-weeding can do for a vegetable garden. As it turns out, it’s much the same for coral reefs.
Following a volunteer “sea-weeding” program launched in Australia, scientists are witnessing compounding coral recovery both in quantity and diversity, and suggest that this simple method has the power to transform degraded reefs overrun by macroalgae.
In a balanced ecosystem, macroalgae is kept in check by the size and health of corals, but as extreme weather events or coral bleaching causes some sections of reef to die, macroalgae has no other neighbor keeping a check on its spread.
Over a period of three years, the joint Earthwatch Institute program led by James Cook University Senior Research Officer Hillary Smith and Professor David Bourne, also at JCU and the Australian Institute of Marine Science, has organized volunteer citizen scientists to help remove macroalgae at two experimental reef sites.
The results of the first three years of work and study have now been published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, and they show a 600% increase in coral recovery rates.
“It’s just like weeding your garden,” Smith said. “Every time we return, the seaweed is growing back less and less, so this method could provide lasting benefit without requiring endless effort.” ...
The importance of the study, Smith details, is that a lot of reef recovery efforts globally are powered by expensive, high-tech, and experimental solutions. The study hoped to show that manual de-weeding was just as effective, and thereby encourage organizations or nations that lack the tech or funding of a country like Australia to pursue sea-weeding as a way of protecting their corals.
“We have yet to see a plateau in coral growth within these plots at Magnetic Island, which is characterized as one of the degraded reefs on the Great Barrier Reef,” Smith said. “We also found an increase in coral diversity, so this method is benefitting a wide range of different coral types.”
Smith said her team are now scoping other locations where the sea-weeding technique could be useful, including the Whitsunday Islands, which are home to a different species of predominant seaweed.
They also want to employ them in French Polynesia, Indonesia, and even Singapore, where experts have identified out-of-control macroalgae spread along coral reefs."
-via Good News Network, September 19, 2023
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surfer-roo01 · 6 months
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Great Barrier Reef,
Australia 🇦🇺
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itgetsbetterproject · 2 months
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🏳️‍🌈 Apply now to get $10,000 for your school! 🏳️‍⚧️
Over the past 2 years, we've granted over $1 million to students across the U.S. through our 50 States, 50 Grants, 5,000 voices initiative to help make their schools more welcoming for LGBTQ+ students.
And yup - we're doing it again.
Do you have an idea that would help make your school better for LGBTQ+ students? Maybe like building...
🟣 A gender-affirming closet
🟣 Your school's first Pride parade
🟣 An LGBTQ+ mural on campus
🟣 A safe space or community garden, or
🟣 Resources for your GSA club?
See some past projects from other students here for inspo.
We know that students know what they need most at their own schools - so middle and high school students across the U.S., DC, and territories can apply now through April 1 for one of our school grants to win up to $10,000 to actually make your project a reality!
The application, FAQs, and more are all available at 50states50grants.org.
Apply now through April 1 - can't wait to see what you all come up with.
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toffychad · 1 month
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I might have found a video of a virtual reality experience of the Octonauts!
Whats surprising is that this is made in 2016 and has tons of information regarding the great barrier reef. Another surprising thing is that they are searching for the crown of thorns starfish!
Could this be the great barrier reef special before 2020?
https://www.hisnameisjoel.com/octonauts-vr-great-barrier-reef-adventure
Here is a link to the vr version of the experience ( its a 360 video! No need for a headset)
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life-on-our-planet · 11 months
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“These are the eyes of a Strawberry Conch (Conomurex luhuanus). They inhabit the shallow tropical waters of the Great Barrier Reef and feed on algae and detritus.” © Lawrence Scheele
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thatbadadvice · 10 months
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Help! My Mother-In-Law Buys A New Outfit Every Time She Pours Jet Fuel on Chilean Sea Bass and Throws Their Carcasses, Flaming, Into the Rainforests from the Open Belly of Her Private Plane
Care and Feeding, Slate, 1 May 2023:
Dear Care and Feeding, My husband and I have two children (2 years and 6 months). We recently moved back to my husband’s hometown to pursue a career opportunity for me. My husband has been home with the kids but was just offered a job. We found a daycare, but it can only take the kids three days a week right now (we’re on waitlists for full-time, but it seems like it could be months or more before we find two full-time spots). My mother-in-law has generously offered to watch the kids for the other two days. Overall, she is a lovely, responsible woman, but we have some significant value differences around environmental issues and I’m not sure how to navigate them. Our household focuses heavily on environmental awareness. We drive electric cars, we compost, we limit our air conditioning, we limit our flying, we eat all leftovers, we avoid plastics whenever possible, and we buy exclusively secondhand clothing. My mother-in-law is a big fan of consumption. Her house is full of plastics. She throws away whatever is left on her plate at the end of a meal, she keeps her house so cold in the summer that I need a sweater and she drives a minivan. I’m concerned about the message it sends to the kids if we stick to our values, except when to do so would be inconvenient. How do I bridge our two very different lifestyles going forward? —Environmentalist Mama in Limbo
Dear Environmentalist Mama,
I'm not sure how you can describe a person who air-conditions her home and drives a minivan as "lovely" and "responsible" but I will assume that this planet-hating harpy has gripped you so tightly in her environmentally irresponsible talons that you cannot see the wildfire-ridden forest for the trees (which she is personally cutting down for fun and profit). Do not let yourself be hoodwinked by promises of familial love and generous offers of free child care, as if these things matter more than assiduously composting! This woman is a monster who is single-handedly destroying the only earth your precious babies have to live on. Imagine the tragedies that will unfold if your children experience a loving connection with a person who purchases items made of plastic? They could come to believe that other humans are whole people with their own interior lives and decision-making apparatuses and values instead of ugly nasty baddies who dare to oppose Mommy's One True And Only Way?
You simply cannot bridge two lifestyles as different as the two you describe here. On the one hand, we have your blameless and perfect eco-conscious little household of brave, Dumpster-diving Oliver Twists, and on the other hand, we have an ethically compromised, unscrupulous, indefensibly ignorant shitbird who probably barbecues her factory-farmed meats over asbestos tiles and flies to Australia to distribute the ashes over the Great Barrier Reef. If Planet Earth does not spin out into an apocalyptic ball of climate disaster by the time your children are old enough to be knifing their peers over tire fires for their share of rat rations, it will be because your uniquely virtuous family had the moral fortitude to drive an electric car and limit your flying. After all, electricity comes from magical climate-neutral fairies and the jet fuel industry is waiting with bated breath for the day that you ground your family and send an international behemoth into wholesale free-fall.
If there is one guaranteed way forward through the climate crisis, it is to silo ourselves into individual categories of "good people" who use paper straws (like you! you are so good!) and "amoral reprobates" (such as your mother-in-law, who sucks!) who do not. The very future of humanity depends on demonizing and shaming other people until they behave as we want them to, privileging individual actions over collective resistance to and accountability for the worst global offenders, and rejecting community-building opportunities in favor of being the only best good person ever.
Build no bridge with this woman! She would probably just drive over it with her minivan, and then the blood of billions will be on your hands.
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ellaandtheocean · 9 months
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Yesterday I got to live my childhood dream of snorkeling and diving the great barrier reef. Aside from seasickness and ear problems while diving, this was an amazing experience. The colors here are like nothing I've seen before in my life. I'm now desperate to find ID guides on corals and reef fish and to learn more. I'd been hoping to see minke whales (aka guided missiles when they're breaching) but seeing a green turtles more than made up for it. I hope that more of these places are conserved and protected, as they show such a wealth of marine life.
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mindblowingscience · 5 months
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At a time when marine life is disappearing from the world's oceans, researchers are celebrating the discovery of a new species of coral reef fish in the southern waters of the Great Barrier Reef. Named the Lady Elliot Shrimp Goby, the previously unknown fish was found as part of a University of the Sunshine Coast-led project that is mapping the changing biodiversity on and around Lady Elliot Island, a tiny coral cay at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef.
Continue Reading.
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arthistoryanimalia · 1 year
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For #WatercolorWednesday:
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Illustrated page from The Queenslander annual, November 4, 1935, p. 29, reproducing Wilfred Morden's watercolor "A coral pool of Queensland's Barrier Reef," digitized by State Library of Queensland.
Pretty!
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rhymingtherapy · 1 year
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journey to the heart
with crystalline perspective
rare insights await
.
RhymingTherapy—April 2023 (Last week I flew in a small plane over the Whitsunday Islands in Nth Queensland. Final photo is the Heart Reef. (My iPhone photos.)
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oceaniatropics · 2 years
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Hinchinbrook Island, Queensland, Australia, by Reuben Nutt
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pangeen · 1 year
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“ How cosy does this algae pillow look? “
// Aleksandr Jeldõšev
Music:  Sydney Rose - Turning Page
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surfer-roo01 · 7 months
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Great Barrier Reef, Australia 🇦🇺
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explore-blog · 2 years
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For World Reef Day, William Saville Kent’s stunning 19th-century illustrations from the world’s first pictorial encyclopedia about the Great Barrier Reef.
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reasonsforhope · 1 year
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“Scientists in Australia have achieved the first-ever offseason coral spawning in the history of coral breeding and restoration sciences.
The breakthrough dramatically expands the capacity to grow corals in captivity to then use to restore the Great Barrier Reef, since it allows the scientists to spawn coral 50% more often than in nature.
At the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences, coral colonies are kept in captivity with the hopes of one day transplanting them to the biggest reef on earth. Out on the GBR, coral spawning happens only twice a year, between October and December [which are summer months in Australia].
At the Institute’s Townsville lab, coral have now reproduced in the middle of winter [August, since this is Australia], thanks to artificial moonlight and controlled temperatures which convinced the 43 lab corals the time was right, despite being 6-months ahead of schedule.
“We’re going to have a lot of opportunities to advance coral reproductive biology,” senior aquarist Lonidas Koukoumaftsis told ABC Australia. “Normally we can only explore this once a year in the summer period...”
“At the moment we only have about two times a year we can generate these juvenile corals and then plant them on the reef,” said Koukoumaftsis “Possibly in the future we can increase that ability to restore the reef.”” -via Good News Network, 8/25/22
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arconinternet · 5 months
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Odell Down Under (Windows 3.1, MECC, 1994)
The direct-control sequel to the classic educational game Odell Lake, trading multiple-choice options for direct control. You can play it in your browser here.
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quotesfrommyreading · 7 months
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In 2013, neurobiologist Kristin Tessmar-Raible and her colleagues published some of the most compelling evidence of a molecular moon clock in an ocean creature. They studied the marine bristle worm Platynereis dumerilii, which looks like an amber centipede with tiny feathered oars running the length of its body. In the wild, the bristle worm lives on algae and rocks, spinning silk tubes for shelter. While reading studies from the 1950s and ’60s, Tessmar-Raible learned that some wild bristle worm populations achieve maximal sexual maturity just after the new moon, swimming to the ocean surface and twirling in circles in a kind of whirling dervish nuptial dance. The studies suggested that changing levels of moonlight orchestrated this mating ritual. “At first I thought this was really crazy in terms of biology,” says Tessmar-Raible, who notes that she grew up far from the ocean, “but then I started talking to colleagues in marine biology and realized that this might not be so uncommon.”
To learn more, Tessmar-Raible and her colleagues kept bristle worms in plastic boxes, feeding them spinach and fish food, and simulating typical and aberrant moon cycles with an array of standard light bulbs and LEDs. Worms raised in perpetual light or in entirely moonless day-night cycles never displayed reproductive rhythms. But worms reared with periodic nocturnal illumination synced their spawning rituals to the phases of their artificial moon. As suggested by earlier studies, Tessmar-Raible found light-sensitive neurons in the worms’ forebrains. And genetic sequencing revealed that the bristle worm has its own versions of essential molecular clock genes found in terrestrial insects and vertebrates. Tessmar-Raible’s conclusion is that the worms have a robust lunar clock analogous to the more familiar sun-synced circadian clock. “This is an endogenous oscillator,” she says. “Something in the body preserves the memory of those nocturnal illuminations.”
In similar studies, Oren Levy and his colleagues collected pieces of living corals from Heron Island reef and housed them in large outdoor aquaria, some of which were exposed to ambient sunshine and moonlight, some shaded at night to block all moonlight, and some subjected to dim artificial light from sunset to midnight and then kept in the dark until sunrise. Each day for eight days before the estimated night of mass spawning, the researchers collected bits of corals from the different aquaria and analyzed the activity of their genes. The corals in natural conditions spawned as predicted and expressed many genes only during or just before releasing their gametes. Corals subjected to artificial light and deprived of moonlight displayed anomalous gene expression and failed to release their gametes.
 —   The Lunar Sea
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