Field trials confirm that the presence and concentration of Crown of Thorns Starfish (CoTS) on any coral reef can be determined from environmental DNA (eDNA) extracted from a small sample of local seawater.  This is a very promising advance. Until now the only way to obtain early indication of the next mass outbreak has been […]

Why does the Queensland Brain Institute do field research on coral reefs at Lizard Island? It’s because marine animals provide rich insight into the evolution and biological functions of brains (all life evolved from the sea); coral reefs host 25% of all marine species; the Great Barrier Reef is the largest and most important reef […]

We recently received a donation of $216.35 from five friends in Northbridge Public School Class 2B:  Alice Berkelouw, Tia McIntosh, Beatrice O’Brian, Abbie Harris and Heidi Heap, aged 7 & 8. Tia’s mother told us how it came about. At school the girls had been learning about fundraising, and also about coral bleaching. The bleaching […]

Barbara Banks and her husband Paul are sailors and frequent visitors to Lizard Island aboard their yacht, Aquasafari.  Barbara is also a keen photographer and has contributed over 1,080 of the 28,250+ records in the Lizard Island Field Guide (LIFG). Barbara & Paul Banks aboard their yacht.  © Barbara Banks   The LIFG serves as […]

Dr Joseph DiBattista, Ichthyologist Joseph DiBattista is a Research Fellow in the TrEnD Lab at Curtin University. Via a joint appointment, he is also Curator of the Ichthyology Collection at the Australian Museum (AM) and an AMRI researcher, based in Sydney. The AM’s Collection holds about 1.8 million adult and larval specimens and over 10,000 […]

Recently-published research confirms the Great Barrier Reef has been resilient to major changes in climate, sea level and water quality on a 30,000 year timescale. Jody Webster is a marine geoscientist. He participated in our Can We Save the Reef? symposium at the Australian Museum in April 2018. With Yusuke Yokoyama, he led IODP Expedition […]

In his book  Other Minds – the octopus and the evolution of intelligent life  Peter Godfrey-Smith  goes back 600 million years to find the common ancestor of octopuses and humans. It was probably a simple worm-like creature, living at a time when no organisms had made it on to land.   Octopuses,squid and cuttlefish are all cephalopods, […]

2018 is our 40th year of supporting science at the Australian Museum’s Lizard Island Research Station and elsewhere on the Great Barrier Reef. Our achievements belong to everyone involved: the talented and dedicated research scientists; the institutions who employ them and provide their base funding; the staff at the Station and the Museum; our Trustees; and […]

How important is continuing research on the Great Barrier Reef, now that (a) the coral population has been diminished and needs decades without further bleaching or cyclone damage to fully recover; (b) climate science says it is unlikely to have this recovery period unless greenhouse gases are significantly reduced;  and (c) there is no realistic […]

Bleaching events killed many reef-building corals in the late summers of 2016 and 2017 .  Given enough time (i.e. a decade or two without further bleaching), these corals will re-establish. Millions of tiny new corals have already appeared during the cooler months, but the prospects for bleaching-free decades over the remainder of this century are […]