Historic coral collection surfaces

The discovery of a unique collection of forgotten corals at UNE’s Natural History Museum earlier this year sent us diving into the history of one of the world’s most acclaimed marine scientists.

Collections manager Professor Karl Vernes found the whitened specimens and their hand-written labels in a box in one of the museum’s back rooms. It soon transpired that they had been collected in 1973 from South-west Solitary Island, off NSW, by a group of students including now Professor Charlie Veron, regarded as the godfather of corals.

Better still, the 177 samples are from the first survey of corals in the Indo-Pacific, pre-dating anything on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), and survive from only the second coral survey conducted anywhere in the world.

“The collection is significant because it dates back almost half a century, when environmental conditions were very different to today,” said Professor Vernes. “These specimens also have a lot of historical value because they were foundational in Charlie’s extraordinary career.”

While he is today a world authority on corals, it was during his Bachelor of Science (with Honours), Masters and PhD studies at UNE that a younger Charlie discovered and pursued a passion for scuba-diving through the university’s small diving club.

He would often visit our marine station at Arrawarra and ‘borrow’ the zoology department’s tinny to explore the Solitary Islands. “It’s where it all started,” Charlie said.

Not even the GBR was a marine park in those days and Charlie and colleagues were instrumental in having the Solitary Islands afforded such protection some 30 years later.

Indeed, during a career that has seen him discover more than 20 per cent of the world's coral species, Charlie is widely credited with transforming our understanding of coral reefs. He has produced 100 publications on coral, including the three-volume bible Corals of the World and the GBR tome A Reef in Time, and was awarded the prestigious Darwin Medal for his work on coral evolution. Most recently, his science has informed reef conservation in the wake of dramatic climate change-induced declines.

And while he is again maddened that another horrific bleaching event is unfolding on the GBR, Charlie is not sitting on his hands. He is part of a mission to collect one of every coral species on the reef to create a biobank that might be used in future repopulation efforts. Some 90 species have been added to this ‘coral ark’ and fragments microchipped and sent to aquaria around the world as an insurance policy.

As for UNE’s humble coral collection, Charlie appreciates the historical interest and that the specimens have been retained all these years. “There is an extraordinary attrition rate for collected coral, probably because they take up a lot of space, so it is really good to see an exception to the norm,” he said.

The future for these cooler-clime corals also begs further investigation. “So far, only one species of coral on the Solitarys is susceptible to bleaching and the corals there are becoming more abundant – something hardly ever seen in coral communities anywhere,” he said.

Professor Vernes is proud that our natural history museum has “possibly the best collection of Solitary Islands corals in NSW”.

“You never really know what the value of the collection will be in the future,” he said. “We are now applying high-end digital morphometrics to museum collections to resolve long-standing taxonomic questions that people had raised in the past, so who knows how these specimens might be used down the track. They serve as a valuable time capsule.”

Now bearing their own individual registration numbers, the specimens will be photographed and added to the museum’s database, so the public and other researchers can share in the excitement of their discovery and rediscovery.

To read more about Charlie’s amazing career, go to https://www.une.edu.au/alumni/Profiles/people/charlie-veron