Fiji - Cicia (FJCC44)

General benthic features

Nine usable wide-angle frames agree with one another on an Acropora-dominated, structurally complex reef. The clearest of them looks along a coral-covered promontory dropping away into open blue: the upper face is a stack of tabulate and corymbose Acropora, with pink and mauve crustose coralline algae binding the framework between colonies and a haze of small damselfish over the crest (e.g., Image 5).

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A second wide frame, which Anderson described as an Acropora garden, shows overlapping Acropora tables and branching thickets set on CCA-encrusted pavement, and a third, shot over a shallow rise, shows a mound built almost entirely of tables, corymbose colonies, and staghorn with fish schooling above it (e.g., Image 4, Image 7).

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A fourth wide frame, with two divers in it at the end of the dive, looks across a broad low-angle slope carpeted instead in plating and foliose corals; the frames do not settle whether this is a deeper zone of the same slope or a separate part of the dive (e.g., Image 9).

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Two hazier, low-contrast frames from the same dive show the same mixed branching-and-tabulate cover under poorer visibility. A large giant clam (Tridacna) is set into the reef framework in one frame, and a large gorgonian sea fan occupies another, with foliose corals, encrusting sponge, and CCA on the substrate behind it (e.g., Image 6, Image 13).

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Taken together the frames describe high structural complexity — tables, branching thickets, plate fields, and CCA-cemented dead framework — with massive corals present but scattered rather than dominant. Expedition habitat notes for Cicia: the benthic community is highly diverse and coral-dominated, often with a substantial macroalgal component, with environment and disturbance regime governing community structure; the edge of the shallow slope is often dominated by large Pocillopora eydouxi colonies, thick-branched and elkhorn-like Isopora sp. and unusually large Favia stelligera and/or Pavona maldivensis stands, while the shallower reef flat is dominated by CCA and exposed at lower tides.

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• Coral cover 42%, from the LOF-GRE in situ transect — a diver transect measurement and the authoritative figure for this site.
• It is not derived from these photographs; the survey data carries the quantitative claims, the photographs only the qualitative account.
• Transect mean 42 ± 6.4% SE (n = 5 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean.

Stressors

No bleaching, disease lesions or crown-of-thorns feeding scars are visible in the habitat frames, but nine uneven frames cannot settle site-wide condition, and Anderson's own sampling record for this dive records two of the colonies sampled on this dive as 80% and 50% bleached, and several others as 5–15% pale. The expedition's 2013 field report records 212 crown-of-thorns starfish removed from one shallow outbreak reef elsewhere on Cicia, not tied to this station. The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 5.0% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral; they carry no bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns field. Typical recent thermal stress: mean annual maximum of 8.9°C-weeks (Degree Heating Weeks, 2021-2025, NOAA CRW; Fiji virtual station).

Comparisons with other data

Apart from the Living Oceans Foundation survey shown here, we found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, one independent station, Reef Check at Barracuda Point, 4.99 km away, read 59% in 2006.

Dive record

FJCC44 (Cicia, Lau Archipelago) was surveyed on 18 June 2013 during the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation's Global Reef Expedition.

Other notes

What follows is written from the site's habitat photographs; the close-ups of the individually sampled Pocillopora colonies were reviewed separately and are not used to describe the reef. The frames carry no scale, so colony sizes and relief are not claimed here.