In this interview, Dr Peter Ridd appeared on 4CA Mornings to discuss the IPA’s research on the Great Barrier Reef.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
John Mackenzie:
The crown-of-thorns starfish are back in the news again, as it is seasonally when money runs out from the government and they’ve got to get tens of millions of dollars more out and about to continue this destruction of these things. I have for years known a gentleman, I haven’t seen much of him lately, but he’s spent his life out on the Great Barrier Reef. He had different size boats, quite bigger boats over the years. He was a fisherman early on, then he took on the tourism thing.
So he was out there taking tourists out to the Great Barrier Reef, and he said to me on several occasions he’s never understood why this huge effort is underway. These crown-of-thorns starfish have been here and across the Pacific for probably tens of, well, probably millions of years actually, and they continue to survive. They spend these millions and millions, tens of millions of dollars every year to eradicate a few of them, and then of course they return. He’s often wondered about this huge expense and effort to reduce the number of crown-of-thorns starfish for a season or two. He might have a point.
It does say here, this is from today’s Cairns Post. “Contrary to popular belief, Pacific crown-of-thorns starfish are native to Australian waters, are native to Australian waters, and as their name suggests, can be found across much of the Indo-Pacific region, including the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, stretching more than 2,300 kilometres along the Queensland coast.” And you read this from The Cairns Post on Wednesday, “The fight against a plague of thorny reef killers, thorny reef killers has been given a funding boost with another,” wait for it, “$54.3 million awarded to contractors along the Queensland coast, including one organisation in the Torres Strait.”
Look, quite some years ago there was, at long last, a realisation that some of this money could be more carefully directed, I suppose. And some action was taken, I guess, back then, but nobody actually was investigated or whatever. People said we’ve just got to be a little bit more careful about how this huge amount of money is disseminated. But here we are, it’s still happening and people are still scratching their noggin saying, “What are we actually achieving here along the 2,300 K’s of the Great Barrier Reef?” In circumstances when information like this emerges in the media, I turn to the independent scientist and marine geophysicist, Professor Peter Ridd.
Peter, good morning.
Peter Ridd:
Morning.
John Mackenzie:
These are significant amounts of money. No surprises there. A funding boost coming up, $54 million going to the contractors along the Queensland coast, including one way up there in the Torres Strait. Achieving what, Peter?
Peter Ridd:
Pretty well precisely nothing, unfortunately. I’m sure the guys work hard and they’ve got the best intention at heart, but these are natural organisms. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and various others claim that, “Oh, well, they’re in plague proportions because of what the farmers are doing.” But interesting statistics like the most number of crown-of-thorn starfish you’ll find are on the Swains Reef, right down the southern part of the reef, which is about up to 200 kilometres away from the coast. And there’s very little correlation at all whatsoever between what happens on the coast and where you get the plagues. We know from geological evidence that they’ve been around for, as you said, at least thousands of years, and it must be actually millions of years.
So yeah, I think there’ll be occasions when we should take them. If there’s a big plague coming or they’re threatening the big tourist pontoons there, we should do it. But essentially we’re playing around with nature when we actually don’t know what’s going on. Even the experts on crown-of thorn starfish say there’s no real evidence to suggest that there’s anything unusual going on. It’s just part of what happens on the reef.
John Mackenzie:
Just staggering amounts of money, though. What is it? $54 million once again. How often does that sort of money get disseminated amongst the contractors?
Peter Ridd:
Well, it’s continuous. That’s over three years. So only, divide that 54 million; $18 million a year. But I’ve done a calculation. In fact, I’m doing some work for the Institute of Public Affairs where we’re trying to tote up how much all this reef catastrophism is costing, and it’s well over a billion dollars. So it’s about $500 million a year just in handing money, pointless money to scientific institutions, things like this crown-of-thorns starfish. And then there’s the loss of productivity. So for example, a coal mine that was stopped.
And then, if you add on the effect of the tourist industry. I’ve done some analysis of the tourism numbers over the last four years, and you can make a strong case that the tourist industry in North Queensland should be at least 50% bigger if it wasn’t for the fact that everybody around the world and Australia has been told that the reef is dead. So this is costing us big, big bucks. And this is just a little, it’s not a drop in the bucket. 50 million is still a lot of money even for this type of stuff. But there is huge amounts of money that are being completely wasted.
John Mackenzie:
It’s just, in fact you’ve just talked about the buckets there, and there’s this image that the coastal streams, this outflow of pollution from our coastal streams is devastating the Great Barrier Reef. You have a way of explaining to people the amount of wash that comes through naturally, I presume south to north inside the Great Barrier Reef, if you like, that makes that outflow from coastal streams almost irrelevant.
Peter Ridd:
That’s right. Because all of the reef is connected to the Pacific Ocean, and as much water flushes in and out from the Pacific Ocean in just eight hours, it comes down all the rivers along the coast of Queensland in a whole year. So the big [inaudible 00:06:09] for the Great Barrier Reef is not the Barron River or even the Burdekin River, it’s the North Vanuatu Jet and the East Australia current. These are the big rivers that flush vast quantities of utterly pure blue azure water into the reef. And actually what we do is, although yes, it will have an effect in Trinity Bay when there’s a big flood, but for most of the time, for almost all of the reefs, the water is pure. It’s beautiful.
John Mackenzie:
By the way, while I’ve got you there too, it’s all over the place, this world’s largest coral found out in the Pacific, out in the Solomon’s somewhere. I don’t quite understand. Is it one huge bommie, the biggest ever found, or is it one singular coral growth? What’s going on with this one? Do you know?
Peter Ridd:
It’s an individual colony. So it’s like a big parietes brain coral. If a reef was a forest, the forest would be the reef and this would be one of the trees. And I forgot the numbers; it’s 30 metres across. So it’s one individual colony. All the individual polyps, the individual little tiny things are identical. So it’s one organism. People sometimes use the word bommie to mean different things. So a bommie can be just a very, very large individual coral, or it can be a whole bunch of corals that are all out by themselves.
John Mackenzie:
I see.
Peter Ridd:
But this is one group of animals that are all together; one piece of coral.
John Mackenzie:
Is it a big deal that it’s more than 300 years old?
Peter Ridd:
No, it’s not. I mean, there’s plenty of these corals which are… Oh, yeah, it is a big deal in the sense that they’re not that common. But the Australian Institute of Marine Science have drilled into these corals to look at climate records, and they go back, I think, to 1540 or something. So some of these corals are 400 years old. I guess it’s pretty rare. And by the way, that’s part of the way we can see that, for example, coral growth rates have not slowed down in the last 400 years. So they’re claiming, oh, in the last 30 years they’ve slowed down. But actually, coral growth rates have not slowed down, because we’ve got all these corals out there which we can drill holes in and measure the rings of their growth, and the corals are doing fine.
John Mackenzie:
There you go. Always good to talk to you, Peter. Thank you.
Peter Ridd:
No problems. Thanks for asking.
John Mackenzie:
Isn’t that refreshing, getting another very qualified point of view on these matters. He’s the independent scientist and marine geophysicist, Professor Peter Ridd.
This transcript with Dr Peter Ridd talking on 4CA Mornings from 15 November 2024 has been edited for clarity.
