Great Barrier Reef Quotes

[Australia] is the home of the largest living thing on earth, the Great Barrier Reef, and of the largest monolith, Ayers Rock (or Uluru to use its now-official, more respectful Aboriginal name). It has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Of the world's ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five of its creatures - the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish - are the most lethal of their type in the world. This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you. ... If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. It's a tough place.

Captain James Cook's ship, The Endeavour, hit a coral outcrop in the Great Barrier Reef in 1770. Cook and his crew camped in what is now called Cooktown for nearly two months while making repairs. Then they sailed south, where Cook claimed the east coast of Australia as British territory.

Darling Daddy, This is Rose. Very good news. Caddy is going to marry Micheal. In case you have forgotten because you have not been home for so long he is the one with the ponytail and the earring that you do not like. And Caddy says she will have a white lace dress and three bridesmaids, Saffron and Sarah and me, and a big party for everyone, all her old boyfriends too. Fireworks. A band. A big tent called a marquee. But where will we put it? Carriages with white horses for us all to go to the church. Afterward Caddy and Micheal will go for a holiday to Australia to visit the Great Barrier Reef. Caddy has it all worked out and Mummy says Yes She Can Of Course You Can Darling Of Course You Must Do That. Saffron said That Will Cost a Few Weeks Housekeeping and Mummy said Yes But We Do Not Need to Worry About That. DADDY WILL PAY. Love, Rose.

Jane, who is much better at reading guide books than I am (I always read them on the way back to see what I missed, it’s often quite a shock), discovered something wonderful in the book she was reading. Did I know, she asked, that Brisbane was originally founded as a penal colony for convicts who committed new offences after they had arrived in Australia ? I spent a good half hour enjoying this single piece of information. It was wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we wished to punish most severely to sit in bright sunlight on the coast of the Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and maybe do some surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they reserve exclusively for use on the British.

Bullock, Sam, died at the age of one-twelve. They’d been married five years. She was forty-six.” “Isn’t that romantic?” “Heart-tugging. First husband was younger, a callow seventy-three to her twenty-two.” “Wealthy?” “Was—not Sam Bullock wealthy, but well-stocked. Got eaten by a shark.” “Step off.” “Seriously. Scuba diving out in the Great Barrier Reef. He was eighty-eight. And this shark cruises along and chomp, chomp.” She gave Eve a thoughtful look. “Ending as shark snacks is in my top-ten list of ways I don’t want to go out. How about you?” “It may rank as number one, now that I’ve considered it a possibility. Any hint of foul play?” “They weren’t able to interview the shark, but it was put down as death by misadventure.

coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef has declined by fifty percent just in the last thirty years.

Indeed, Australia is a large net importer of seafood. This is because much of Australia’s waters are, like much of Australia itself, essentially desert. (A notable exception is the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, which is sumptuously fecund.) Because the soil is poor, it produces little in the way of nutrient-rich runoff.

We had almost exactly a year together as a couple after that. She wanted to swim the Great Barrier Reef. I wish we had gone. I wish we had read books to each other. We had one weekend of sexy-times in New York City while her father looked after the kids. I wish we’d had more. I wish we’d walked more. I wish we hadn’t sat in front of the TV so much. It was nice, we cuddled, we laughed at Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, but it didn’t make much in the way of memories. We did such ordinary, banal things. Ordered pizza and played Trivial Pursuit with her sister and her dad. Helped the kids with homework. We did dishes together more than we ever made love. What kind of life is that?” “Real life,” Harper said.

You certainly don't fuck about trying to ride manta rays.

Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals. Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey. The snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, colored world is glassed over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better than his own, creeps out, exposing his soft body to the enemy for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from his brother. The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnie accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down. Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a gray mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing color of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tips of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. On the exposed rocks out of water, the barnacles bubble behind their closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down to the rocks come the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide Pool again. And on the reef the whistling buoy bellows like a sad and patient bull.

Algal overgrowth has killed streams, lakes, and coastal ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere. And it’s not just the fish that are dying. The birds that eat the fish are dying, too. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is now the size of New Jersey and is growing. Worse, more than a 150 smaller dead zones have been identified throughout the world. The Baltic Sea north of Germany is one of the most polluted marine ecosystems on the planet; in the 1990s, the Baltic cod industry collapsed. The Thames, Rhine, Meuse, and Elbe Rivers in Europe also contain more than a hundred times the amount of synthetic nitrogen that is considered safe. Similar problems are occurring in the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and China’s two largest rivers: the Huang He and Yangtze.

Great Barrier Reef, it is by far one of the most venomous fish in the world.

A paper published in Nature by the former head of the One Tree Island Research Station, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, predicted that if current trends continue, then by around 2050 visitors to the Great Barrier Reef will arrive to find “rapidly eroding rubble banks.

Reefs, [Charlie Vernon] points out, are nature's archives and historians. They are complex data banks that record evidence of environmental changes from millions of years ago up to the present.

Unfortunately, one of the planet’s most biodiverse and important ecosystems will not survive two degrees intact. The science on corals and global warming has got steadily more alarming over recent years, in tandem with the accelerated destruction of reefs by rapidly rising temperatures around the world’s tropical coastlines, as has already been described. In 2018 the IPCC had to admit that ‘tropical corals may be even more vulnerable to climate change than indicated in assessments made in 2014.’ Marine biologists watched in horror as the Great Barrier Reef suffered back-to-back bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, losing fully half its coral cover in the process. The IPCC’s latest predictions for the two-degree world are dire: even if global temperatures stay under 1.5 degrees, 70–90% of reef-building corals will be lost. With two degrees of warming, this increases to 99%.

LIKE the Jews, the corals of the Great Barrier Reef observe a lunar calendar.

anyone from Birmingham would understand, it was a complete rarity for anything to be dancing across the grass, especially sunlight, as England constantly loses sunlight to nicer, brighter countries like Australia. Ironically, Australia was the place where England sent its criminals. They were caught doing some illegal act in a dreary, dank, and gloomy country where drizzle was a common factor throughout the day, and then they got shipped off to a beautiful sandy beach, very close to the Great Barrier Reef. Punishment was obviously a skewed thought in everyone’s mind back in the olden days. Probably something to do with the rain falling and softening what were obviously already very soft heads.

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The Great Barrier Reef extends, discontinuously, for more than fifteen hundred miles, and in some places it is five hundred feet thick. By the scale of reefs, the pyramids at Giza are kiddie blocks. The way corals

After each outing, I spent hours looking through a huge volume called The Fishes of the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea. Among the fish that I think I may have spotted were: tiger sharks, lemon sharks, gray reef sharks, blue-spine unicorn fish, yellow boxfish, spotted boxfish, conspicuous angelfish, Barrier Reef anemonefish, Barrier Reef chromis, minifin parrotfish, Pacific longnose parrotfish, somber sweetlips, fourspot herring, yellowfin tuna, common dolphinfish, deceiver fangblenny, yellow spotted sawtail, barred rabbitfish, blunt-headed wrasse, and striped cleaner wrasse. Reefs are

Travel Bucket List 1. Have a torrid affair with a foreigner. Country: TBD. 2. Stay for a night in Le Grotte della Civita. Matera, Italy. 3. Go scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef. Queensland, Australia. 4. Watch a burlesque show. Paris, France. 5. Toss a coin and make an epic wish at the Trevi Fountain. Rome, Italy. 6. Get a selfie with a guard at Buckingham Palace. London, England. 7. Go horseback riding in the mountains. Banff, Alberta, Canada. 8. Spend a day in the Grand Bazaar. Istanbul, Turkey. 9. Kiss the Blarney Stone. Cork, Ireland. 10. Tour vineyards on a bicycle. Bordeaux, France. 11. Sleep on a beach. Phuket, Thailand. 12. Take a picture of a Laundromat. Country: All. 13. Stare into Medusa’s eyes in the Basilica Cistern. Istanbul, Turkey. 14. Do NOT get eaten by a lion. The Serengeti, Tanzania. 15. Take a train through the Canadian Rockies. British Columbia, Canada. 16. Dress like a Bond Girl and play a round of poker at a casino. Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 17. Make a wish on a floating lantern. Thailand. 18. Cuddle a koala at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. Queensland, Australia. 19. Float through the grottos. Capri, Italy. 20. Pose with a stranger in front of the Eiffel Tower. Paris, France. 21. Buy Alex a bracelet. Country: All. 22. Pick sprigs of lavender from a lavender field. Provence, France. 23. Have afternoon tea in the real Downton Abbey. Newberry, England. 24. Spend a day on a nude beach. Athens, Greece. 25. Go to the opera. Prague, Czech Republic. 26. Skinny dip in the Rhine River. Cologne, Germany. 27. Take a selfie with sheep. Cotswolds, England. 28. Take a selfie in the Bone Church. Sedlec, Czech Republic. 29. Have a pint of beer in Dublin’s oldest bar. Dublin, Ireland. 30. Take a picture from the tallest building. Country: All. 31. Climb Mount Fuji. Japan. 32. Listen to an Irish storyteller. Ireland. 33. Hike through the Bohemian Paradise. Czech Republic. 34. Take a selfie with the snow monkeys. Yamanouchi, Japan. 35. Find the penis. Pompeii, Italy. 36. Walk through the war tunnels. Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. 37. Sail around Ha long Bay on a junk boat. Vietnam. 38. Stay overnight in a trulli. Alberobello, Italy. 39. Take a Tai Chi lesson at Hoan Kiem Lake. Hanoi, Vietnam. 40. Zip line over Eagle Canyon. Thunderbay, Ontario, Canada.

Long

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He [Scott Morrison] says Greg Hunt saved the Great Barrier Reef.

I chose to trust him when he said that the sharks were like the “dogs of the sea” and took aim, plunging into a shark-less patch of ocean. The water stole all my senses in a second, then a tail called them to attention, whipping my legs as I surfaced among the bubbles, my heart pounding.

in the summer of 2016, pegged to the release of the movie Finding Dory, Pixar listed a night on a chic floating raft in the Great Barrier Reef designed to bring winners as close as possible to the natural habitat of Dory and Nemo.

The village was kissed by a kaleidoscope of colour – on the facades of restaurants, hostels and hotels, boutiques and bars. Fresh seafood was the star of every menu, of course, with the lobsters basically walking up the sand and straight onto the plate. But for me, the star of Caye Caulker wouldn’t be the sun or the sea, it would be him.

The Great Barrier Reef is so extensive that no human mind can take it in, the exception perhaps being astronauts who've seen its full length from outer space. Gigantism pervades its statistics. Roughly half the size of Texas, it encloses some 215,000 square miles of coastland, sea, and coral. It extends for about 1,430 miles along Australia's east coast, and encompasses around three thousand individual reefs and a thousand islands. So vast is it, in fact, that it's only since the 1970s, with the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, that a size has been more or less agreed upon. Prior to that, explorers and navigators gave varying figures for its length.

There are many corals that are not algae-assisted, but all reef-growing corals are. They need the extra energy generated by the algae's oxygen and sugars to grow fast enough to combat all the forces that work toward reef destruction.

Finally, on October 26, 1981, the Great Barrier Reef received what two of its finest historians, James and Margarita Bowen, have called a 'conservation climax' - World Heritage listing 'as the most impressive marine area in the world.' The Reef met all four of UNESCO's 'natural criteria.' It was an outstanding example of the earth's evolutionary history, an arena of significant ongoing geological processes and biological evolution, a superlative natural phenomenon, and a significant natural habitat containing threatened species of animals or plants with exceptional universal scientific value.

It was clear that the greatest coral diversity in the world was centered on a roughly triangular area within the Central Indo-Pacific, known ever since as 'The Coral Triangle.

. . . most humans were not so good at grasping aspects of nature that couldn't be clearly defined or placed into hierarchies, even though nature's products were 'seldom organized into species at all.' Now [Charlie Vernon] saw that, considered over vast geographical space and long swathes of geological time, coral species were malleable and temporary units, fluidly interlinked by their genes to other units, and forming ever-changing patterns. Corals had to be treated as continua, not as fixed, isolated units.

When corals are exposed to temperatures two or three degrees hotter than their evolved maximum of eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, along with increased levels of sunlight, it's lethal. The powerhouse algae that live in the corals' tissues, providing their color and food through photosynthesis, begin to pump out oxygen at levels toxic to their polyp hosts. The corals must expel their symbiotic life supports or die. Row upon row of stark white skeletons are the result. These damaged corals are capable of regeneration if water temperatures return to noral and water quality remains good, but the frequency and intensity of bleaching outbreaks is now such that the percentage of reef loss from coral deaths will increase dramatically.

the unfolding waves of sound are like an underwater orchestra or the endless improvisation of a jazz band. On the Great Barrier Reef, the humpback whales sing the soprano melody. Fish supply the chorus: whooping clownfish, grunting cod, and crunching parrotfish. Sea urchins scrape, resonating like tubas. Percussion is the domain of chattering dolphins and clacking shrimp, who use their pincers to create bubbles that explode with a loud bang. Lobsters rasp their antennae on their shells like washboards. Rainfall, wind, and waves provide the backbeat. To get the best seat, you would have to attend the concert in the middle of the night at the full moon, when fish chorusing typically crests. But you wouldn't necessarily need to have a front row seat: mass fish choruses can be heard up to 50 miles away, and whale sounds resonate for hundreds of miles.

Meanwhile, on the earth of the baby, the climate grew hotter: icebergs melted, the seas rose, permafrost cracked to release prehistory, sections of the Great Barrier Reef blinked out whitely and one by one.

This book is a story of encounters between Reef peoples and places, ideas, and environments, over more than two centuries, beginning with James Cook’s bewildered voyage through a coral maze and ending with the searing mission of reef scientist John “Charlie” Veron to goad us to act over the impending death of the Reef.

And there is always an infinite range of choices,' Hugo went on. 'An infinite number of video tapes, or books, or paintings, or meals...Now, I am a scientist. And I have lived many scientific lives. In my original root life, I have a degree in Biology. I have also, in another life, been a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. I have been a marine biologist trying to protect the Great Barrier Reef. But my weakness was always physics. At first I had no idea of how to find out what was happening to me. Until I met a woman in one life who was going through what we are going through, and in her root life she was a quantum physicist. Professor Dominique Bisset at Montpellier University. She explained it all to me. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics.

Jessica uncapped a marker and wrote ILLS at the top of the whiteboard. “Right,” Averman said. “I thought we’d begin with an overview of the problems at hand. This is a brainstorm. There’re no bad suggestions. We’ll prioritize and organize in the second session.” Four men spoke at once and then deferred to Roark. “We’re to list, what? Global pandemics?” “Everything. Like heart disease, for example.” Averman replied. Jessica wrote HEART DISEASE in the top left corner. A voice from the third row. “World hunger?” Jessica wrote WORLD HUNGER. Guy figured he’d come this far. “Jingoism!” JINGOISM. Benatti yelled, “Famine!” “Isn’t that the same as world hunger?” Roark asked. A chorus of assenting murmurs. Wright called up from the second row. “World hunger is a distribution problem. Famine is agricultural.” “Gentlemen.” Averman put his hands up in a conciliatory gesture. “Again, there are no bad suggestions. We’ll sort everything in the second session.” FAMINE. “SIDS!” Mary Ellen yelled. “Malaria!” someone shouted. Momentum gathered: “Alzheimer’s! Influenza! Cerebral palsy! Women’s education! Recidivism! Rising oceans! The migrant crisis! Diabetes! Earthquakes! Wage disparity! Racism! Blindness! Domestic abuse! Nuclear armament! Nuclear stockpiling! Opportunity for the less affluent! Drug patents! Ennui! Urban zoning! High-speed internet access! The Great Barrier Reef! Food deserts! Healthcare reform! Religious extremism! Crohn’s disease! Meningococcemia! Carbon emissions! AIDS! Female genital mutilation! Apathy! Child labor! Deafness! Corporate monopolies! Tax reform! Flesh-eating viruses! Infrastructure! University endowments! River-borne diseases! Mudslides! Marfan syndrome! Wildfires! Sexism! Opioids! Locked-in syndrome! Gambling addiction! Lyme’s! Lack of potable water! Tuberculosis! COPD! Syphilis! Deaths of despair! Mass transportation! High blood pressure! Bee extinction! Monogamy! Pneumonia! Mass incarceration! Mass migration! Pornography! Fibromyalgia! Diarrhea! Cirrhosis! Bacterial infections! Poor hygiene! Illiteracy! E. coli! Car accidents! School shootings! Xenophobia! Holy wars! Preterm birth complications! Sugar! Terrorism! Diabetes! Unemployment! Depression! Norovirus! Fracking! Oxygen depletion in the oceans! Nuclear waste! Mortality! . . .