Dr Dean Miller is a marine biologist, film maker, photographer and the managing director of Great Barrier Reef Legacy, a non-profit organisation based in Port Douglas dedicated to conservation of coral reefs around the world with an array of innovative projects. We sit down with him to discuss his latest endeavour – a Living Coral Biobank.

OM: What was the inspiration for the Living Coral Biobank?

DM: Our organisation, Great Barrier Reef Legacy, was created by a group of dedicated professionals who live and breathe the Great Barrier Reef every single day. Tourism operators, educators, multimedia professionals, marine biologists, scuba divers, engineers – people who work out there and could really see that we could make a big difference really quickly if we band together. We created a non-profit organisation that supports research so we can understand what’s happening out on the Great Barrier Reef and try to address the issues.

We had 2016 and 2017 mass bleaching events back to back here, which were devastating for the Great Barrier Reef, particularly the far northern region, which is where we’ve been doing a lot of our work. We put together some major expeditions back in 2017 we were the first team to go up and assess what had happened underwater, and we took a team of experts from all over the world to provide an overall reef health assessment, and to look for where the corals survived. We knew a lot of corals had died, but what we were hoping to find was where the corals had actually made it. They were called the Super Corals and that expedition was called Search for the Super Corals, and that was really good. We found the first definitive Super Coral species, which was the one that seemed to survive everywhere, everywhere we went.

We ran an expedition in 2018 called Search for Solutions, and again we supported research projects that looked at trying to improve the health of the Great Barrier Reef through a range of different ideas. Everything from gene modification to, improving heat tolerance through generations of increasing heat in coral fragments. We realised that all of these projects were really hopeful, but 10-15 years away from becoming successful. We came up with the idea for the Living Coral Biobank by looking at the aquarium collectors that have been pioneering the keeping of corals for the last 30-40 years, and using the technology, skills and expertise that had already been established. I thought: ‘look, let’s just collect all the corals. Let’s keep them in a holding facility, and at least we’ve got them you know, as an insurance policy. So, when these other projects come online, you know we’ve got the fragments they need to repopulate and regenerate.’ Anything that needs to be done down the track can be achieved through this Biobank project. We connected with Cairns Marine and Dr Charlie Veron, a world-renowned coral expert. Together, we realised that this is all possible.