Name: How Scientists Are Restoring The Great Barrier Reef | Travel + Leisure
Uploaded: 2025-07-30T09:34:19.000Z
Duration: 7 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

People come to the Great Barrier Reef and expect doomsday.

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It has been publicised that the Great Barrier Reef is dead, I can assure you it's definitely not dead.

However, the Great Barrier Reef is under threat.

There is so many animals that are relying on us, we need to do something because if we lose all of this, it's going to have a huge impact.

My name's Johnny Gaskell and I'm a marine biologist on Daydream Island.

I guess the first thing we do each day is head into the living reef, check the animals, check the 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, it's a 2300 kilometre stretch of coral reef.

So all of the organisms that make up the Great Barrier Reef are 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 colour in the coral is actually an algae that lives inside the coral tissue and that's where you get all the bright vibrant colours.

It is very important to note that although some parts of the Great Barrier Reef are still 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 because 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 for about 30 hours.

So we did lose a number of sites in the Whitsundays to cyclone damage.

The day I jumped in at Lover's Cove after the cyclone, it was about four weeks after the cyclone.

I really didn't want to get in because I kind of expected what was there.

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 realise it was your last time.

So now I just want to do whatever I can to help it get back to as close as what it was as possible.

There's two methods of coral propagation that we're using at the moment.

We 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 trialling 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 until they get to that size we need and then out plant them back into the wild, into the sites where we've had cyclone 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 out planting can be done much faster.

This one here I actually designed late one night, some crazy idea.

We're really lucky that the Queensland and 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.

We've got the coral raceways up and running, ready to go and the very first coral is about to go in it.

This will be one of the species that we will be propagating inside the raceways to then out plant into the wild.

We've actually named him, we've named him Steve.

The longer we leave him in here and the longer he stays healthy, the more we know that this system really works.

I actually haven't been in here since the cyclone, 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 going to jump in now with the camera and see if the corals are going to have a happy home.

What I just saw down there was clear cyclone damage.

There's not much cover on any of the rock surfaces and 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 an indication of how it's 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.

The Great Barrier Reef is a project supported by the U.S.

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How Scientists Are Restoring The Great Barrier Reef | Travel + Leisure

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