Fiji - Cicia (FJCC48)

General benthic features

The 14 frames in the station's folder confirm this as a taxonomically mixed site and show its structure. The bright crest frames (e.g., Image 13, Image 10, Image 12, Image 16, Image 15) show a terrace crowded shoulder to shoulder with corymbose Acropora in tan, pink, mauve, and olive, tabulate Acropora tables stacked and overlapping, upright staghorn branches, mustard-yellow massive colonies, yellow encrusting colonies, and brain corals with meandering valleys low in the frame, with anthias, damselfish, and small planktivores over the top.

1310121615

Image 7 isolates the growth form that defines the site: a mushroom-shaped tabulate colony standing clear on a narrow stalk, flanked by lilac corymbose colonies against blue water.

7

Image 6 is the close-range set-piece — a large flat-topped pinkish-tan corymbose Acropora filling the center, mauve and olive-green corymbose colonies around it, a gray-green lobed leather soft coral, and dark red and orange encrusting algae binding the framework.

6

Image 15 pulls back over a whole reef mound tiled with dozens of overlapping tables and corymbose plates. The structural highlight is Image 1, an overhanging buttress projecting out into blue, its underside and flanks built almost entirely of pale-green encrusting and plating corals with tabulate colonies on the upper surface — a shaded, plating-dominated growth form quite unlike the tables above.

1

Image 5 looks along the reef edge, where yellow-green digitate and branching colonies and dark red algal patches take over.

5

Three deeper frames show the hazier, lower-cover slope — a fish-filled canyon in poor visibility (e.g., Image 2) and a pale pavement-and-rubble slope with striped damselfish and a small reef shark cruising past (e.g., Image 4).

24

Image 14 is a portrait of a pocilloporid colony Anderson left unidentified: a knobby cream-and-tan branching colony against golden encrusting coral.

14

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• Coral cover 47%, from the LOF-GRE in situ benthic transect (the mean of all of this station's own transects in the expedition's per-transect benthic data) — a diver transect, and the authoritative value for this site.
• Transect mean 47 ± 15% SE (n = 4 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean.

Stressors

No disease or crown-of-thorns scarring is visible in any frame — though the survey team's own notes for Cicia (retained below) record an active COTS outbreak on one reef elsewhere on the island, which these frames do not show. Anderson's sampling sheet records the one colony sampled here (F102) as 5–10% bleached but otherwise healthy; its macro shows the bleached, white branch ends (e.g., Image 9).

9

The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 3.8% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral.

Fish and other fauna

Two frames are fish frames on the reef: "blanketed with fish" (e.g., Image 11), with purple anthias and damselfish massed over a coral mound, and "sergeant majors" (e.g., Image 3) against a hazy wall.

113

Comparisons with other data

FJCC48 (Cicia, Lau Archipelago) was surveyed 19 Jun 2013 during the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition. The benthic community is highly diverse and coral-dominated often with a substantial macroalgae component. Environment and disturbance regime govern benthic community structure. Scleractinian diversity is very high and often dominated by acroporids, pocilloporids, poritids, and faviids. 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. In the shallower areas, the reef flat was dominated by CCA and is exposed at lower tides. 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.