Concept
Great Barrier Reef
Related concepts (25)
Acropora
Acropora is a genus of small polyp stony coral in the phylum Cnidaria. Some of its species are known as table coral, elkhorn coral, and staghorn coral. Over 149 species are described. Acropora species are some of the major reef corals responsible for building the immense calcium carbonate substructure that supports the thin living skin of a reef. Depending on the species and location, Acropora species may grow as plates or slender or broad branches.
Cairns
Cairns (ˈkɛərnz, ˈkænz; Gimuy) is a city in Queensland, Australia, on the tropical north east coast of Far North Queensland. The population as of the Census 2021 was 169,312, having grown on average 1.02% annually over the preceding five years. The city is the 5th-most-populous in Queensland, and 15th in Australia. The city was founded in 1876 and named after Sir William Wellington Cairns, following the discovery of gold in the Hodgkinson river.
Aboriginal Australians
Aboriginal Australians are the various indigenous peoples of the Australian mainland and many of its islands, but excluding the ethnically distinct people of the Torres Strait Islands. The term "Indigenous Australians" is applied to Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders collectively. People first migrated to Australia at least 65,000 years ago and formed as many as 500 language-based groups. They have a broadly shared, complex genetic history, but only in the last 200 years were they defined as, and started to self-identify as, a single group.
Sea snake
Sea snakes, or coral reef snakes, are elapid snakes that inhabit marine environments for most or all of their lives. They belong to two subfamilies, Hydrophiinae and Laticaudinae. Hydrophiinae also includes Australasian terrestrial snakes, whereas Laticaudinae only includes the sea kraits (Laticauda), of which three species are found exclusively in freshwater. If these three freshwater species are excluded, there are 69 species of sea snakes divided between seven genera.
Marine heatwave
A marine heatwave (abbreviated as MHW) is a period of abnormally high ocean temperatures relative to the average seasonal temperature in a particular marine region. Marine heatwaves are caused by a variety of factors, including shorter term weather phenomena such as fronts, intraseasonal, annual, or decadal modes like El Niño events, and longer term changes like climate change. Marine heatwaves can lead to severe biodiversity changes such as coral bleaching, sea star wasting disease, harmful algal blooms, and mass mortality of benthic communities.