Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef • Hacker News Board

Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#91

Post by hz9090786 » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 1:51 PM UTC

JacobThreeThree wrote: post #53

throwaway5959 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we just have a moment of happiness? Of optimism?

Nobody can have any optimism, everyone must hold the view that the Great Barrier Reef is in imminent peril. If you don't and are vocal about it, you risk your career. https://phys.org/news/2021-10-court-physicist-intellectual-f... >Australia's highest court Wednesday dismissed an intellectual freedom claim by a university physicist who was fired in part over his public statements that scientists exaggerated damage to…

No, anything less than fear and self-flagellation is prohibited. I am reminded of that Michael Crichton quote:

“There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment.”

(And yes, I’m aware that one can tag Crichton with a thought-terminating label such as “climate denier.”)

Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#92

Post by jrslv » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

BariumBlue wrote: post #26

pabs3 wrote: post #16

This is apparently only for one particular kind of fast-growing coral, which means coral diversity is lower and that makes the reef more vulnerable to damage and less supportive of the wider ecosystem: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/great-barrier-reef-re...

I wonder if, like forests, corals tend to colonize an area first with fast growing species, which then get slowly replaced by longer lived species (forest succession). I understand that it takes a while for a forest to go from clean-field to a fully matured forest though.

Yes, the branching corals are the fast-growing early colonisers. The habitat they create is attractive for fish and invertebrates. Together they make up a reef ecosystem. The resilient reef-building massive corals typically appear on the reef later and grow much slower.

Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#93

Post by thaumasiotes » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:16 PM UTC

darkerside wrote: post #89

thaumasiotes wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know evolution is made of dying, right? Not true in the slightest; evolution is solely driven by differential reproduction rates. You'll see evolutionary dynamics even if every organism you study is immortal and invulnerable. Dying is just one of many things that affect your ability to reproduce.

In theory, sure. But in practice, it's driven by dying.

No, that's still not true.