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Check out the Heron Island photo – Are you interested in that?


From Jennifer Marohasy’s blog

November 24, 2021 By jennifer

I’m looking for feedback, including comments and corrections, on this draft blog post. Previously, I emailed Richard Vevers (October 1, 2021) and requested additional information at the Catlin Survey website (April 20, 2021), but did not receive any response from both. Irus Braverman was kind enough to reply to my email (September 30, 2021) stating that the photo was used in her book Coral Whisperers was offered to her by Richard Vevers.

If all science were ‘physics’ or ‘stamp collecting’ as Ernest Rutherford once suggested, I would argue that it is important that we do not knowingly distribute counterfeits.

Healthy Coral, Bleached Image – Draft

Does it matter if the Internet is flooded with fake photos accompanied by fake stories? Are these pictures keeping kids up at night – worried about climate change and the impending doom of our Great Barrier Reef?

There is a photo that has been promoted by Richard Vevers, founder and CEO of The Ocean Agency, an international non-profit organization based in Washington whose purpose is dedicated to marine conservation. It is described on his website The Ocean Agency as having been taken at Heron Island in 2015. On Flickr, the same photo is described as having been taken in 2014, and in Irus Braverman’s book. Coral Whisperers as was done in 2016.

Screenshot from Ocean Authority Website. A red asterisk has been added by me, to draw attention to the date as indicated at this site.
Screenshot from the Flickr website. Added red underline to draw attention to the date.
Photo from Irus Braverman’s book. Added red underline, to draw attention to the date.

At least two of these photos must have been incorrectly labeled.

The main credit involved the XL Catlin Seaview Survey – billed as ‘the largest Great Barrier Reef survey ever conducted’, ‘using a unique SVII underwater camera system’ and getting started from 2012 – gave credibility to the photo.

The XL Catlin Seaview Survey was jointly conducted by the University of Queensland with Google, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. United States implementing regulatory agency (NOAA) and other agencies. The expedition visited Heron Island on November 4, 2012. Photos from this survey can be viewed online, but this photo is not among them.

According to the survey’s website, XL Catlin returned to the Great Barrier Reef in 2014 after Hurricane Ita and again in 2016 after a mass bleaching of coral. However, none of the 226,000 georeferenced reef survey images were publicly available from these expeditions.

According to another survey, an aerial survey conducted in 2016 by Terry Hughes from James Cook University, much of the northern part of the Great Barrier Reef was bleached that year; however, Heron Reef, part of the southern Great Barrier Reef, was not bleached at the time.

In fact, the photo was almost certainly taken on October 22, 2014, and it is not the coral bleaching that is being seen. I hypothesize that corals appear to be bleached because The photo was taken through layers of water absorbing light in the red spectrum and/or because some colors were stripped from the photo during post-production. Either way, it’s not fit for purpose; It cannot be reliably presented as evidence of coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef in 2016.

Vever’s organization has the official endorsement of the United Nations Ocean Decade and the photo may have been ostensibly promoted by him to support ocean science and conservation, and as evidence of bleaching at Heron Island in 2016. But this doesn’t make the photo a real one. In fact, the photo fits all the criteria of forgery. I believe it does not show coral bleaching and there was no mass coral bleaching on Heron Island in 2016, or in 2015 or 2014.

I visited Heron Island earlier this month (November 2021) with underwater photographers Stuart Ireland and Leonard Lim. There, we found the surrounding coral reef to be very healthy, including the towering coral fields. We do not have a ‘unique SVII underwater camera system’, nor the endorsement and sponsorship of a university, Google or the United Nations, but I intend to put a color chart among the corals to facilitate correct white balance in post-production.

Jen Marohasy (foreground) and Leonard Lim (background) with color histogram above Stuartan reef, Heron Reef, November 9, 2021. Image source Stuart Ireland.
Jen Marohasy in the coral fields, Heron Reef, November 9, 2021. Photo source Stuart Ireland.

It is clear from our photographs, with a palette that provides some quality assurance, that the horned coral fields at Heron Island are not bleached – not this year, anyway. Maybe next?

However, XL Catlin and Richard Vevers Surveys, via the website Flickr, continue to perpetuate the myth that they are bleached – most recently on reputable sites Smithsonian Journal.

Surely the children of the world deserve to know the truth about the corals of Heron Reef.

The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum, education and research complex. But it seems they don’t have a lot of processes in place to control the quality of their journal’s information.
Screenshots. This photo has been published and reprinted, including in the Sydney Morning Herald in April 2021.

*****

The photo featured at the top of this post was taken by Stuart Ireland at Heron Reef on November 11, 2021. There is so much diversity and so much beauty. Coral gardens are everything but ostentatious, they are delicate and very lively. What a privilege it was to dive that reef for three days. Many thanks to not only Leonard and Stuart, but also Andrew, Adam and Diego. There will be a documentary, featuring more than one banana sea cucumber.



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