Fiji - Kabara (FJKA30)

Setting

FJKA30 (Kabara, Lau Archipelago): surveyed 13 Jun 2013 during the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition. The expedition's own site table classifies FJKA30 as a barrier reef on an exposed aspect, surveyed on the fore reef, outside the lagoon.

General benthic features

The expedition's site notes for Kabara's fore-reef stations (FJKA30, FJKA32, FJKA33, and FJKA34) describe spur-and-groove terraces at 5-12 m with a large build-up of sediment between the spurs, a slope that becomes very steep around 15 m with many small to medium acroporids and Pocillopora, high CCA cover with little macroalgae, and small encrusting colonies. Alongside the hard coral already reported for this site, the same transects recorded 24% crustose coralline algae, 6.4% turf, 13% sediment-laden turf, 0.8% macroalgae, 14% erect algae, and 6.0% cyanobacteria (64% algae in all). Non-living substrate came to 71% pavement, 2.6% dead coral, 0.8% rubble, and 0.2% sand. All of these figures are means of all of this station's own transects in the expedition's per-transect benthic records, so they are survey results, not photographic estimates.

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• Coral cover 25% (the expedition's in situ transects).
• Transect mean 25 ± 4.0% SE (n = 5 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean.

Stressors

The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 6.0% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral; they have no bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns field. The expedition's site notes for Kabara's fore-reef stations name no stressor, and Anderson's sample sheet lists no colonies from this team-surveyed station. Archipelago-level context, not an observation here: the Lau field report calls bleaching rare, crown-of-thorns starfish scarce outside one Cicia reef, and disease low in prevalence, with Drupella lesions on 5-25% of corals.

Fish and other fauna

Paired fish transects recorded about 43 fish species per transect and about 14 kg per 100 m2 of biomass.

Comparisons with other data

No coral colonies were sampled at this station for the 2017 molecular study (Mayfield et al. 2017, PLoS ONE); Kabara's corals with an outlier score came from FJKA31, where 1 of 4 was flagged as a physiological outlier.

No underwater photographs from this station are on file.