The camera doesn’t lie – looking back over three years of observations

Out on A Swim

‘Out on a swim’ is a coral reef blog that tells the stories of the characters who live under the waves and what has caught my eye when ‘out on a swim’ in the lagoons of Norfolk Island. It is also a record of the difficulties Norfolk Island’s reef faces, like many others around the world, as a result of the poor water quality that has been allowed to flow onto it.

This blog is rated in the Top 20 Coral Reef Blogs in the world.

Day 1 – March focus on Norfolk Island’s reef

Introduction

I have been photographing Norfolk Island’s reef for more than three years. Before I began this project I had no idea what I was looking at, how to use my camera, or even any idea where this I was heading as I began to take photos. All I knew is I wanted to record what was happening because, to my eyes and having returned to the island after a long absence, the reef didn’t look as good as I remembered.

Don’t get me wrong, it still looked good. But something wasn’t right and I didn’t know what that was.

I quickly realised that the reef is often overlooked in favour of our terrestrial wildlife and ecosystems. I wanted to show people what an amazing place it is.

I wondered what would be the best way to interpret the reef for the casual observer – in the spare time I had outside my full-time work and with limited resources. So that became my task: to find out and show people our awesome marine environment right on our doorstep. In the process I created this website, and the blog posts began.

Along the way I discovered that my hunch about the reef not looking as good as it had before was correct. I became aware of the problems facing Norfolk Island’s reef – in common with many reefs worldwide – and aware that my grandson would in all likelihood be unable to enjoy what I had shown his mother when she was growing up on Norfolk Island.

In short, and unintentionally, I became an advocate for the reef.

Fast forward to the end of February 2023 when I was sorting and cataloguing my latest batch of images. I realised that looking back over my observations I had a unique library of some 80,000 images recording what has been happening in our bays. But my memory goes back much further than that – long before I had a camera to take with me on my swims – to 1996 when I first began swimming almost every day in Norfolk Island’s beautiful coral-reefed lagoons.

Renowned coral reef researcher Professor Callum Roberts from the University of Exeter in the UK often talks about a phenomenon called ‘shifting baseline syndrome’:

This tendency renders each new generation blind to past losses, setting their personal baseline of normality by what they first find. Reef Life, An Underwater Memoir

With his words in mind, I thought I’d spend March featuring one post a day highlighting the reef and lagoonal ecosystems. There are so many wonderful things to see that it would be a travesty to dwell purely on the problems. Having said that, if we don’t wake up and do something fast, we will lose this wonderful habitat.

You can go back through the stories on this blog to find some wonderful stories about the reef and its inhabitants; but if you want further background reading specifically about the issues we face, these earlier blog posts are a good place to start:

Two montipora coral colonies, side by side, exhibiting the brown and blue colour morphs

A close up of the two montipora colour morphs

To start my March focus on Norfolk Island’s reef, I thought I would begin with one of our most common coral families – the genus montipora.

Montipora coral

For 1 March I have picked a very simple brown coral – a plate coral from the genus montipora. I love this photo at the top of this post for the shapes described by the edges of the plates. These white edges are where there is new growth but the symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) have not yet been taken up by the new coral polyps. It is the zooxanthellae that give the coral its colour.

To grow and breed every living thing needs energy, which they get by burning food. Corals get much of their food, and therefore energy, from the zooxanthellae, which provide the coral with food they have created by the process known as photosynthesis. In return, the coral polyps provide the zooxanthellae with a protected environment and the nutrients they need to be able to carry out this process.

A colony of montipora with obvious signs of white syndrome (26.02.23)

In the photo (top of the page) you can see that this is a really healthy colony; however, montipora have been very prone to white syndrome in our bays due to the ongoing issues with poor #waterquality; consequently, colonies free from disease like this one are getting harder to find.

In the images (above) you can see the two colour morphs that we have in our lagoons: brown and blue. The blue colour intensifies in winter as the montipora releases some of its symbiotic algae.

The image, right, is of a different colony of montipora with recent signs of white syndrome. The white patches of dead tissue tend to spread, sometimes quite rapidly over the course of a month. The dead tissue will then gradually become a home for algae to settle and grow. All the fish that once lived on and around the coral plates will have to move elsewhere. Sadly, this situation is occuring repeatedly across Norfolk Island’s lagoons.

Jun 13, 2025

Glimpses of recovery: what the reef could be if we let it

Day 6 of this photo series from Norfolk Island coincides with the final day of the UN Ocean Conference in Nice. After a week of documenting decline, today’s post offers a different view – what reef recovery can look like when conditions improve. Drought in 2024 gave the reef a break, and the results were unmistakable: healthier corals, lower disease, and more fish. This is what’s possible if we act.

Jun 12, 2025

Warning signs: quiet and unnoticed collapse of two coral colonies

Day 5 of my blog series for the UN Ocean Conference: two long-lived coral colonies in Norfolk’s lagoon died quietly from disease. No drama – just slow collapse and overgrowth by algae. A reminder that not all reef losses are loud, but they are happening.

Jun 11, 2025

Warning signs: what Norfolk Island’s reef is telling us

Day 4 of a week-long photo series from Norfolk Island, shared during the UN Ocean Conference in Nice. Today’s post spotlights a Hydnophora pilosa colony where white syndrome appeared suddenly and spread quickly, taking out around a quarter of the coral. In the months that followed, algae quietly filled the gap – a subtle but telling shift from coral to algae that’s happening across the reef.

Jun 10, 2025

Warning signs: coral disease takes hold

In Day 3 of this blog post series, published while leaders gather at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice, we see Norfolk Island’s coral reef lagoon quietly delivering a stark warning: recurrent land-based pollution, coral disease, and delayed decisions are dismantling this ecosystem in real time.

Jun 9, 2025

Warning signs: coral growth anomalies – the slow cancers of the reef

Day 2’s post coinciding with the UN Ocean Conference looks at coral growth anomalies – sometimes called coral ‘cancers’. These slow-moving diseases quietly weaken coral colonies, making them far more vulnerable to storm damage and algal takeover. On Norfolk Island’s reef, I’ve watched this exact process play out over several years. This is how chronic stress silently dismantles coral ecosystems.

Jun 8, 2025

Warning signs: shifting baselines on Norfolk Island’s reef

Today is World Ocean Day — a timely moment to launch my week-long blog series on Norfolk Island’s reef. Each day this week, I’ll be sharing photo essays that document the slow but steady pressures reshaping this fragile reef. Today: how shifting baselines make us blind to what we’ve already lost.

Apr 29, 2025

The Governance–Government Vacuum: Norfolk Island’s Forgotten Ecology

A personal reflection on Norfolk Island’s coral reef environment, political denial, and what John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes can still teach us about slow-moving disasters — and why this election matters more than ever.

Feb 20, 2025

Cute as buttons – Astrea curta

Astrea curta corals are ‘small, moderately plocoid [flattened], distinct, and almost circular’ . Normally grey-green in colour, you can see from the images here, ours are often beautiful rich gold, although they do vary. They have a neat growth habit and button-like corallites, which can grow in columns, spherically or flattened. Large colonies of these can form gorgeous undulating bumps.

Jan 26, 2025

From 'Watch' to 'Warning'

Last week, the chance of coral bleaching in Norfolk Island’s inshore lagoons was raised from ‘Watch’ to ‘Warning’ and will more than likely rise to Alert levels one and two in coming weeks. So why do I worry about water quality all the time when bleaching seems inevitable these days and so the reef is probably doomed anyway? Read on to find out.

Jan 4, 2025

From little things – watching them grow

Small numbers of different fish species is not an unusual phenomenon on Norfolk Island’s reef, but it does demonstrate what a tiny, precious, coral reef ecosystem we have, when we can count individuals on one hand and watch each of them grow, like these little blackeye thicklips, a member of the wrasse family.