people come to the Great Barrier Reef and expect doomsday it has been
publicized that the Great Barrier Reef is dead I assure you it's definitely not
dead however the Great Barrier Reef is under threat there are so many animals
that are relying on us we need to do something because if we lose all of this
it's gonna have a huge impact
my name is Johnny Gaskell and I'm a marine biologist on daydream island we
got LuAnn here they're young LuAnn oops
pushy I guess the first thing we do each day is head into the living room check
the animals check corals check the water quality once we've done that we invite
guests to come with us on educational tours to inspire people to want to
protect the oceans through the connections that they make with the
animals the Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on the planet
to 2,300 kilometer stretch of coral reef so all of the organisms that make up the
Great Barrier Reef colonies of animals and these little polyps excrete calcium
carbonate and make these structures underneath the soft tissue and that's
how you get your coral structure the color in the coral is actually an algae
that lives inside the coral tissue and that's where you get all the bright
vibrant colors it is very important to note that although some parts of the
Great Barrier Reef are still thriving on the other side there's a lot of parts of
the Great Barrier Reef that need help if something's not done soon we may lose
these places in 2016 and 2017 there was two mass bleaching events and cuz it was
consecutive it had a significant impact on the Great Barrier Reef an estimated
one third of the Great Barrier Reef was affected by this and we did lose a lot
of coral after the 2017 bleaching we were hit with tropical cyclone Debbie
and that cyclone was a category four that basically sat over the whitsundays
through thirty hours so we did lose a number of
sites in the whitsundays - cycling damage the day I jumped in at Lover's
Gove after the cyclone was about four weeks after the cyclone I really didn't
want to get in because I kind of expected what was there
it was stills the worst just having that memory of this underwater city just with
corals everywhere fish everywhere it's so harsh that one day you got in and you
didn't realize it was your last
so now I just want to do whatever I can to help it get back to as close as what
it was possible there's two methods of coral propagation that we're using at
the moment collect coral put them onto nurseries that we've actually built
under the water in the Marine Park and then give the corals time in these
nurseries to get to a suitable size where we can then plant them back into
the damaged sites the other method that we're trialing here at the moment is to
use coral raceways that are actually out of the water these tubs use raw water
that cycles through them to basically replenish whatever's in there so we
actually grab the corals from the wild put them into the raceways leave them
there in the raw water as it cycles in a controlled environment for four to five
months till they get to that size we need and then I'll plant them back into
the wild into the sites where and damage the advantage of using the
raceways is it's controlled it's right there we have it in front of us and if
God forbid another cyclone comes along at least then we have the coral
fragments ready to go inside these raceways and the outlanding can be done
much faster so this is a coral Raceway this one here I actually designed late
one night some crazy idea we're really lucky that there Queensland an
Australian government actually funded this project it's really good to get the
support of the government and without them none of this would have actually
happened it's the first time this is done in the region so hopefully in the
future other places do the same thing so this is a pretty exciting moment we've
got the coral raceways up and running ready to go and the very first coral is
about to go in and let's do it
oh the sit all right Carl
Wow
yeah eight months of planning and this is it the korells in this will be one of
the species that we will be propagating inside the race ways to then out plant
into the wild who have actually named him an annex Steve the longer we leave
him in here and the longer he stays healthy
the more we know that this system really works first Carol have a look at it it
is thriving Kyrgyz doubled in size already
you know what I actually haven't been in here since the cycling this spot
after the corals have spent a bit of time in the raceways this is potentially
one of the sites that we will aim to restore so I'm gonna jump in now at the
camera see if the girls are gonna have a happy heart
what I just saw down there was clear cyclone damage it's there's not much
cover on any of the rock surfaces and a coral rubble as far as you can see with
a little bit of assistance hopefully this site can come back people
all over the world want to come and see the Great Barrier Reef but there are
actually ways that people can come and help out with the recovery of the reef
the citizen science effort is paramount to this project we want people to come
to the region go to the sites that we've recovered take photos send them to us
upload them and then hopefully over time we can get a an indication of how its
recovered it's not too late for the Great Barrier Reef if everybody does
their part then future generations will get to experience all of this
you