Fig. 8

Winner, Editor’s pick: A “well-armed” coral reef community. “The underwater equivalent of tropical rainforests, healthy coral reefs teem with life. Often conspicuous, other times a little harder to spot. Like this octopus, that pretended to be a coral as I approached it. The complex three-dimensional framework that corals build provides a sheltered habitat and ideal camouflage ground to approximately ¼ of all marine species, even though reefs are just specks in our oceans. It is hard to imagine however how a bleached or dead reef could host such biodiversity, an alarming thought given the back-to-back global bleaching events of 2016 and 2017. Heron Reef, along with other reefs in the southernmost section of the Great Barrier Reef, may have escaped the bleaching that hit the warmer northern section this time round, but how well-armed these reefs are against intensifying climate change and other anthropogenic pressures is questionable.“Attribution: Michelle Achlatis