Author Archives: John Sear

About John Sear

JOHN SEAR is an experienced Scuba Diver, Underwater Photographer and Citizen Scientist who, together with assisting curation of the Australian Museum’s Australasian Fishes Project on iNaturalist, has also contributed over 10,000 observations to the same platform. He has also co-authored the Sydney Harbour Fishes book with the Australian Museum. With a specific interest in both fish and coral he has been documenting impact of climate change on his local dive site, Cabbage Tree Bay Aquatic Reserve, in metropolitan Sydney. Combining this passion with his corporate background in Program Management, he has introduced two new data collection sites, monitoring temperate coral health, on the Atlas of Living Australia database. In 2015 he discovered a handful of small colonies of Pocillopora aliciae , a coral only recently described as a new species, in the aquatic reserve at Cabbage Tree Bay. It is a sub-tropical species and is approximately 150km further south than its previous southern distribution range. Since then, it has been proliferating across the urchin barrens, bare rock platforms that used to be kelp beds. In 2025 he has received confirmation of the identification of a new species of Enneapterygius he discovered in Sydney Harbour, and will be co-authoring the paper that describes it.