We have got so used to the playful idea of the flyingsaucery Shine Dome as the Martian Embassy (artist Trevor Dickinson's witty depiction of it) that one half-expected, crossing the Dome's/Embassy's threshhold on Tuesday to meet Martians there.
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Instead the venue was packed with scholarly scientists (not quite so alien as Martians but still exotic in their way). They are attending the cerebral pow-wow Science at the Shine Dome 2016: Human Plus.
Scholarly scientists surely have almost the best attention span stamina there is in these dumbed-down times and yet the conference's schedule on Tuesday had every speaker, however august, obliged to rattle through his or her address in a bite-sized 15 minutes. There was a stopwatch on a screen and scholarly referees made sure no one over-nattered.
For journalists (notorious for having the attention spans of a Clownfish) this makes for an attractive conference. Journalists like colour and movement and with a 15-minutes-each schedule there is always the possibility of a sparkling speaker just around the corner.
And sure enough, with the desperate plight of the Great Barrier Reef so much in the news, Professor David Bellwood of James Cook University gave a newsworthy and entertaining talk The past, present and future of coral reefs. He began and ended by maligning Nemo, perhaps the most famous fish in the world, the brightly coloured Clownfish star of Walt Disney Pictures' Finding Nemo. The professor's point was that everybody loves Nemo "because he's so orange" and so pretty.
"He's beautiful but functionally [in terms of his usefulness to the places, the systems where he occurs] he's about as much use as a bedbug."
By contrast, the professor explained, singing the praises of some parrotfish of the Great Barrier Reef, the parrotfish "are grey, they're boring, but they're the ones that are going to keep reefs in in good conditions".
He said that when he first began to study the Great Barrier Reef he, like everyone, was struck by the teeming miscellany of fish species, the biodiversity.
"But then I realised that biodiversity was skin deep."
He is fascinated by the evolution of fish and so by everything to do with fish bones and fish skulls. Entertainingly, for he doesn't seem to have any pretentious tickets on himself, he said that he knew better to natter on about his obsession to people while at fish BBQs. This interest had led him to think of fish as machines that do jobs in the places in which they live. And it emerges, he said, that while a reef may teem with species, sheer diversity is not enough. The fish species are not of equal ecological usefulness because so many of them gravitate to attractive and inessential work, just as if teeming people took up easy work "as Tim Tam testers".
Meanwhile other reef species, less teeming and less conspicuous, do vital work. And so it has come to pass that about 25 million years ago parrotfish evolved from having more-orthodox teeth (biting, piercing ones) to having unusual but well-adapted fangs (he flashed a huge picture of them up on a screen) "that are like having a row of toothbrushes in your mouth".
Yes, that's exactly what they looked like.
With the skull and the toothbrush teeth they've acquired, parrotfish "when they're feeding, they brush all the sediment off the reef", the professor rejoiced.
"They ingest it, they wrap it in mucus and put it in holes in the reef. Its like having a [robotic] vacuum cleaner that cleans up your house and puts it all in a biodegradable sausage and buries it in your garden."
And so the parrotfish are cleaning up, regularly, the parts of the reef where they, the fish, are abundant and in good shape. But alas these vital fish species, like reefs themselves, increasingly find themselves "overwhelmed" by the pace and volume of harmful change.
The professor, cheerful and demonstrative in his manner (using his arms and his hands like an orchestral conductor conducting a mild-mannered classic) insisted he was optimistic about the futures of reefs. And yet from where I sat up in the cheap seats of the Dome (the prime seats all given to the scholars) his stated optimism seemed to depend on so many things working out well. He used the word "overwhelmed" a lot. One thing that must work out well, he told us, is that those reefs where the drab but yeomanlike parrotfish thrive must be protected so that the water quality is good enough to keep these parrotfish healthy and busy. We must work with these inconspicuous achievers.
Overall, he insisted, "The thing is with reefs is that they've got a basic capacity [to regenerate]. They have what the Americans call 'bouncebackability'."
"Reefs are constantly regenerating. We've had several bleaching events and they've come back. But now it's the frequency of the events that's the problem, the scale, the extent of it. But reefs have this basic capacity. It's not like working with pandas, where the species doesn't seem to want to feed. Reefs really want to help themselves. It's just that we [humans] have got to put the effort in to keep the water quality. We've got to change the ways we deal with fossil fuels."
Science at the Shine Dome: Human Plus continues on Wednesday and Thursday at the Shine Dome/Martian Embassy, Gordon Street, Australian National University.
