Since 2022, at the end of each year I’ve published a ‘Year in Review’ post – just to take stock of what’s happened under the waves: the wins, the losses and the changes. As I said back in 2023, documenting Norfolk Island’s reef on this website feels a bit like an insurance policy. These posts bear witness to what is happening, so we – and those who have the power to help – don’t ‘forget’ what we stand to lose.
For me, 2025 has been an extraordinarily busy year. I found my feet in my PhD studies, took on volunteer roles on various local advisory committees, and then started work experience at Norfolk Island National Parks in the second half of the year. And I managed to keep this website ticking over with new blog posts and updates to all the species pages.
We began 2025 with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch Satellite Bleaching Alert being raised from ‘watch’ to ‘warning’ in late January. You can sign up for these alerts, and at this time of year in this part of the world a lot of marine scientists watch them like hawks. Fortunately, we escaped the worst of it this time – although we weren’t so lucky back in 2024. If you want the detail, click here to see NOAA’s Norfolk Island bleaching stress maps (including what’s predicted for the coming weeks). By the end of January we should have a clearer picture of how we might fare with regards to bleaching this summer season.
By the end of April we were in the throes of a federal election campaign and I confess to venting my frustration in this post: The Governance–Government Vacuum: Norfolk Island’s Forgotten Ecology. Nothing much has changed since then. Our Norfolk Island’s governance is still a mess, democracy still eludes us, and consequently the federal government continues to kick the necessary governance changes – the kind that might actually protect Norfolk Island’s environment – down the road.
In that post, I reference John Wyndham’s book The Kraken Awakes:
Earth is invaded not through spectacular battles, but via a slow, almost imperceptible ecological catastrophe. The true focus of the novel is not alien monsters, but human failings: denial, political ineptitude, media distortion, and societal inertia.
The parallels to today’s environmental crises – climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean degradation – are chillingly clear. Early warnings are ignored because they are inconvenient. Scientific complexity is misrepresented or trivialised to appease audiences and protect interests. Public inertia reigns until disaster is irreversible.
In June, over six days, I wrote a series called ‘Warning Signs’ to coincide with the UN Ocean Conference held in Nice from 9–13 June. These included:
Warning signs: coral growth anomalies – the slow cancers of the reef
Warning signs: quiet and unnoticed collapse of two coral colonies
But I finished that run on a note of cautious optimism with:
There are plenty of other posts from 2025 to explore, and plenty of them are full of much better news. The drought of 2024 and early 2025 (which brought anxiety to residents relying on tank water) was, in an odd and uncomfortable way, a reprieve for the reef. Below is a diagram of 2025 rainfall plotted against the long-term monthly means (records here go back to 1891). The early part of this year, to my eyes, saw an amazing lift – corals looked healthier and seemed to be growing well – and it was a reminder of how resilient reefs can be when conditions ease off.
But as you’ll see from the rainfall pattern in the graph below, the rain returned in April and we ended up with a very wet winter indeed. With the wet, we seem to have had an uptick in coral disease. It will be interesting to confirm this, or not, when the coral health research reports are delivered in 2026.
Bureau of Meteorology, © Commonwealth of Australia. Licensed from the Commonwealth of Australia under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
The yellow boxfish was inspiration for designers at Mercedes Benz
Because not everything has to be doom and gloom, one of my favourite posts this year was the one about biomimicry – and how a little yellow boxfish caught the eye of Mercedes Benz as possible design inspiration for a car: Biomimicry: How a Boxfish Caught Mercedes Benz’s Eye.
There were other fun (or interesting) posts scattered through the year too – including:
…and a sea anemone that acts rather like a temperature barometer (a bit like corals do) by turning pale under heat stress as it loses its zooxanthellae, or symbiotic algae.
If you want some hope-in-photos, have a look through the images in Reef Relief.
A glowing Diadema sea urchin
Halgerday willeyi - 1970s retro!
For 2026, the biggest challenge for our reef is arguably the planned dredging project for Kingston’s Pier, which I write about here: To dredge or not to dredge? The Kingston Pier channel project. In this article I take a dispassionate look at what dredging can mean for Kingston’s coral reef. I followed it up with a quick look at dredging projects around the world and how they have fared: Reef grief: what dredging has done to other reefs.
I’m often asked why I keep posting – why I keep documenting, counting, photographing, and writing about what I see. Partly it’s because I’m fascinated. Partly it’s because I can’t unsee the changes once I’ve noticed them. And partly it’s because this reef is my daily place – it’s where I think, reset, and learn.
This year reminded me that reefs can be astonishingly resilient when they’re not being hammered from every direction at once. That’s a comforting thought – and also a confronting one, because it means some of the damage we accept as ‘normal’ is not inevitable. So I’ll keep doing what I can do – getting in the water, keeping records, putting the evidence somewhere public, and telling the story as honestly as I’m able.