Discovering the Life and Death of Coral: Charlie Veron, an Antipodean Darwin

In July 2009, at a special lecture of the Royal Society in London, J.E.N  ‘Charlie’ Veron, Darwin medalist, famed Australian coral scientist, and discoverer of over twenty percent of the world’s corals, predicted the impending extinction of the Great Barrier Reef. In this talk I would like to tell the story of how this brilliant unorthodox scientist came to this grim realization.

An adventurous field scientist like his idol and namesake Charles Darwin, ‘Charlie’ clocked up 7, 000 hours of diving while seeking to describe and map Great Barrier Reef and other world corals. Yet these observations confronted him with puzzles that would haunt him for twenty years. Living corals turned out to be far more protean than taxonomic guides compiled from inert ‘type specimens’ in leading museum collections allowed. Moreover, common species varied strangely in different habitats and regions. Early in the 1970s Charlie lit on an answer to the mystery — a controversial new theory of coral evolution that now sits alongside Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In the process, he also came to realize that world corals were under dire and imminent threat from human-driven climate change.

Charlie’s searing Harvard book of 2008, A Reef in Time. The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End, argues, too, that corals are archives of deep time, telling the stories of past extinctions and providing an early warning system of larger and potentially catastrophic global environmental changes already underway within our atmosphere and oceans. Our planet’s sixth mass extinction beckons.