The reef is dying. So why can up to 190 tonnes be chopped out each year?

It is one of the seven natural wonders of the world and features on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Why then, critics ask, does Australia allow up to 190 tonnes of corals from the Great Barrier Reef to be chopped off and sold for use in aquariums around the world?

On Facebook pages and websites, it’s possible to choose between colourful Duncanopsammia, with their gently waving tentacles, and stony corals such as Acropora – despite the practice being banned by other countries across the region.

Most of the corals removed from the Great Barrier Reef are destined to be sold on the international market, much of it to the United States, and installed in private aquariums.

The trade in live corals – which was worth an annual $25 million in 2020-21 – is legal, with private operators licensed by the Queensland government to collect soft and hard corals, sea anemones and coral rubble by hand.

A 2024 federal government assessment of Queensland Coral Fishery said the industry was incentivised to target particular species by the demand for colourful corals, “but there has been little data collection or analysis to understand the risk coral extraction has on the broader ecosystem”.

Given the fishery’s operations within both the Coral Sea Marine Park and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, fishers are bound to comply with federal environmental laws.

But as the reef suffers severe and repeated mass bleachings – in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2025 – questions are mounting about the viability of the trade.

The wild harvest levels permitted by the Queensland and Australian governments might have been sustainable years ago, says Australian Marine Conservation Society campaigner Simon Miller, but not in the face of climate change-fuelled marine heatwaves and repeated bleaching events.

“Some reefs lose 40 per cent of their coral cover [during these events], and so when we’re seeing these huge impacts from climate change, and corals under immense pressure, and we still have this fishery ... taking up to 190 tonnes a year, that just doesn’t seem to pass the pub test any more,” he said.

“There’s some real sustainability concerns, particularly for a handful of coral species that are found nowhere else on earth – they’re only found on the Great Barrier Reef – and they have high value in this global aquarium trade.”

Australia is a big player in the international trade of corals, second only to Indonesia, exporting about $18 million worth of live corals in 2020-21 (the most recent figures available). The market supports 180 full-time equivalent jobs and 35 businesses.

The difference, however, is that Indonesia farms its corals, whereas Australia relies on wild harvesting.

AMCS is calling for Australia to phase out the legal trade in wild corals and pivot to a similar model to Indonesia’s, which relies on aquaculture.

Second-generation wild coral fisherman Caleb Cousland, however, said the 190-tonne quota of specialty and other corals was a “paper quota” only, and estimated about 60 tonnes was removed from the Great Barrier Reef each year.

His family’s business owns the second-largest quota in the country and can remove up to 28 tonnes of corals for export.

“It’s actually one of the most heavily regulated fisheries in Australia, and probably the world,” he said.

Cousland said increased regulation and changes introduced in recent years – including increased reporting requirements – meant fewer corals were being removed from the reef than in the past.

Fishers’ quotas also included species that weren’t viable for the aquarium trade, he said.

“Nobody wants those corals ... they still have our coral quota allocated to them, but basically nobody collects them, so there’s been also a further reduction in the actual amount of coral that’s actually collected from the Great Barrier Reef,” he said.

The 2024 federal assessment of the coral fishery said more research was needed to determine whether selective harvesting was detrimental to the structure and function of local coral systems.

Corals are listed on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES).

Under the CITES convention, countries must prove that wild collection is not detrimental to species. The European Union has imposed import bans on a range of Australian corals, over concerns about insufficient data and record keeping.

“Live wild coral exports have been banned by Indonesia, Thailand, Fiji and Belize, while the European Union and United Kingdom ban imports of some of the most valuable Great Barrier Reef corals,” the AMCS’s Miller said.

“Yet, the harvest of our rare and unique corals continues despite the Reef being in crisis.”

In November, the federal Environment Department announced it had partnered with supply chain innovation firm OriginsNext to develop a corals traceability scheme to bolster public trust in the wild corals trade and support regulation and transparency of the trade.

Cousland maintains that coral species can be protected by the provision of commercial coral licences held by fishers, and said it wasn’t in the industry’s interests to over-harvest corals.

“Where are the scientists going to get their species from to be able to do studies on the reef [without live harvesting]?” he asks. “Because the problem that the scientists have got is that they’re tied up in so much red tape [that] they just can’t actually go out and physically collect the corals themselves, so without our fishery they wouldn’t have the specimens to actually to do any sort of research work on.