Marine Survey - Most Large Reef Fish Missing From Australian Coast

[hatrack]

The world's first continent-wide survey of reef sea life has found big fish gone around much of the Australian coastline. A year-long circumnavigation of Australia ended in Hobart on Wednesday with a trove of data from 700 coral and rock reef sites surveyed by volunteer divers for the Reef Life Survey Foundation.

Program co-founder Graham Edgar, of the University of Tasmania, said the first comprehensive study of any continent's reef systems found biodiversity losses, compared to earlier local counts.

''Virtually all of our coastline has had all the larger predatory organisms reduced - from the big fishes to the lobsters,'' said Professor Edgar, from the UTAS Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies. ''It's not just over-fishing, it's the spread of invasive species and problems such as pollution when you get near metropolitan areas.''

His 14-metre catamaran Reef Dragon served as dive platform on a 12,000 nautical mile circumnavigation while 75 trained divers examined the life on reefs up to 400 nautical miles offshore. The odyssey took the divers from the pitch dark waters of Port Davey in south-west Tasmania to spectacular Osprey Reef, a sheer-walled coral atoll off far north Queensland.

EDIT

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/reef-audit-finds-big-fish-lost-20140220-3342f.html

[Cofitachequi]

1. Environmentalists on this continent are likely to find more receptive allies on other continents...

...as the opposition is well organized and funded in the US.