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Leading Marine Scientist Praises Quicksilver’s Reef Management

A leading international marine conservation scientist is full of praise for the condition and quality of the Great Barrier Reef off Port Douglas. Dr. Rod Salm, who recently attended the Asia Pacific Marine Meeting of The Nature Conservancy, a US based global organisation whose charter is to preserve the diversity of life on earth, said he was amazed at the health and vigor of the corals he saw when he snorkelled and dived at Agincourt Reef.

A marine conservation scientist focusing on coral reefs, Salm has worked extensively throughout the world’s reef systems and has just passed his 40th anniversary of working in marine conservation. Raised in Mozambique, he has studied coral reefs around the East African Coast, the North and West Indian Oceans up to the mouth of the Red Sea, and the Caribbean and Indonesia.

“I’ve been fortunate to see reefs almost before other humans during my early career,” he said. “In 1973, I worked with a group studying the Crown of Thorns starfish phenomenon and we began in the Torres Strait and followed the Great Barrier Reef all the way down to Lord Howe Island. My strong memories of Agincourt Reef during that trip were a great deal of dead corals in the wake of the starfish plague. This week, I had the opportunity to go out with Quicksilver and I was keenly interested to see how the company managed the tourism experience. I dived and snorkelled, and I was impressed by the management of the day by Quicksilver, and by their reef platform and its surrounding corals. I was actively looking for evidence of human damage to the corals and I saw none.

While I was snorkelling, I saw the most impressive evidence of the healthy state of the corals. As a conservation scientist, my focus is discovering aspects that demonstrate resilience to climate change and I found a great deal of evidence that the corals at Agincourt are in a very positive state. In fact, the corals from the top of the reef down to a depth of 5 metres were as healthy and vibrant as I’ve seen anywhere with good colour, no disease and active growth. What impressed me most was the coral closest to the surface, where the tips extend often into the sun at low tide and dieback is apparent due to this, had thriving growth - the corals were actually mushrooming over the exposed dieback and this is one of the most healthy indicators I could have wished for.”