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# On Norfolk Island, the reef's best news comes from the people who swim it every week
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/norfolk-reef/
- Published: 2026-10-30T05:34:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-02T10:46:21.000Z
- Description: Norfolk Island's lagoon reef is honestly in trouble, rated High Concern this year. Yet the offshore coral is thriving, a fifth of the lagoon's pale corals turn out to be perfectly healthy, and the septics draining to the bay are being replaced. Here is what gives the scientists hope.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Conservation, Innovations, All stories

For six years Susan Prior has walked into Emily Bay with a camera, swum out over the lagoon and photographed the same corals, so she knows which have gone pale and which are quietly growing. A writer and editor on the island who took up a PhD in her sixties, she helps the University of New South Wales and University of Newcastle team that has surveyed the Kingston lagoon every six months since 2020\. Their report this March is blunt. It rates the inshore reefs of Emily Bay, Slaughter Bay and Cemetery Bay High Concern: disease in 30 to 75 per cent of coral colonies, turf algae spreading over the bare rock that baby corals need, bleaching in 2020, 2024 and again this past summer. So where is the hope? Out at Elephant Rock. On that offshore reef coral cover sits at about 47 per cent and the team found no disease, which tells them the lagoon's trouble comes off the land, not out of the sea, and that is a problem an island can fix. Inshore coral cover has held at about 26 per cent since 2020, the fish are still diverse, and the cool summer of 2024/25 brought no bleaching, which the team called a minimum two year recovery window.

![Branching and boulder corals in clear water in the Kingston lagoon, Norfolk Island](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/06/0d067be9-327f-4730-b9c3-5f0cdd2bc6fa/content/images/2026/11/norfolk-reef-prior-cover.jpg)

Coral in the Kingston lagoon, October 2026\. Photo: Susan Prior.

Then there is the coral that only looks sick. In April, Associate Professor Tracy Ainsworth, Professor William Leggat and their colleague S. Vuleta published a year of watching two kinds of massive coral in the lagoon, in Pacific Conservation Biology, and found about a fifth of the colonies pale or white all year round. Measured properly, those pale corals photosynthesise as well as their darker neighbours, hold as many symbiotic algae and did not falter when the water warmed. Pale is not bleached, and colour alone can misjudge a reef. Meanwhile the land is being fixed. At Kingston a small area beside the bay has now been sewered, the first part of an $8.2 million pumped network, and much of the catchment still drains to the aquifer and the Marine Park, so that work has a long way to run; CSIRO has had more than $4.23 million since 2019/20 to track where the pollution comes from; cattle have been fenced out of the creeks, banks planted and leaky weirs built to slow and filter the flow. Nobody has yet measured cleaner water in the lagoon, but the report is plain that better water is the most effective thing anyone can do for this reef. An unmanned surface vessel now images the whole lagoon, new software reads the pictures for disease, and in July the Australian Government and Parks Australia proposed expanding the Norfolk and Lord Howe marine parks by 671,500 square kilometres, with Norfolk to get its own management plan. Susan Prior will be back in the bay with her camera, counting.

![A lime green coral colony on the lagoon floor at Slaughter Bay, Norfolk Island](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/06/0d067be9-327f-4730-b9c3-5f0cdd2bc6fa/content/images/2026/11/norfolk-reef-prior-lime-green.jpg)

The lime green coral in Slaughter Bay, which Susan Prior traced through forty years of photographs and papers. Photo: Susan Prior.

### Sources and links

Our short take: from the Norfolk Island Lagoonal Reef Ecosystem Health Assessment, March 2026, prepared for Parks Australia by Associate Professor Tracy Ainsworth and Dr Tom Moir (UNSW), Professor Troy Gaston and Professor William Leggat (University of Newcastle) and Professor Moninya Roughan (UNSW), the August 2025 assessment by the same team, the Vuleta, Leggat and Ainsworth paper in Pacific Conservation Biology (16 April 2026), the department's Improving Norfolk's Water Quality note (11 June 2026, no byline) and Parks Australia's news item of 4 June 2026 (no byline). Photographs: as credited in captions.

- [Norfolk Island Lagoonal Reef Ecosystem Health Assessment, March 2026](https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/norfolk-island-lagoonal-reef-ecosystem-health-2026) High Concern rating, 30 to 75 per cent disease, Elephant Rock at about 47 per cent with no disease, the surface vessel, the mooring, Susan Prior in the acknowledgements.
- [Norfolk Island Lagoonal Reef Ecosystem Health Assessment, August 2025](https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/8ddbfe58-b46d-452e-8926-c59a372ab1e6) No bleaching in 2024/25, the two year recovery window, inshore cover about 26 per cent since 2020.
- [Parks Australia, reef health monitoring tracks environmental pressures on Norfolk Island reefs (4 June 2026)](https://parksaustralia.gov.au/news/reef-health-monitoring-tracks-environmental-pressures-on-norfolk-island-reefs-0/) Plain language summary of the 2026 survey.
- [Vuleta, Leggat and Ainsworth, Pacific Conservation Biology, 16 April 2026](https://doi.org/10.1071/PC25027) About 20 per cent of Platygyra and Paragoniastrea colonies pale year round with normal photosynthesis and symbiont numbers.
- [Improving Norfolk's Water Quality, 11 June 2026](https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/department/media/news/improving-norfolks-water-quality) $8.2 million sewer, completion late 2026, CSIRO $4.23 million since 2019/20, fencing, planting, leaky weirs, council funding.
- [Australian Marine Parks, shaping and protecting Australia's ocean for the future (31 July 2026)](https://australianmarineparks.gov.au/news/shaping-and-protecting-australias-ocean-future/) Proposed expansion, stand alone Norfolk plan, consultation to 30 September 2026, drafts in 2027.
- [Susan Prior, Norfolk Island Reef](https://norfolkislandreef.com.au/) Six years of photographs of the lagoon, the Out on a swim blog, the Monday reef talk.