Fiji - Kabara (FJKA33)

Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation — Global Reef Expedition

Part of the regional summaries: Fiji - Kabara, Fiji - Southern Lau (Kabara / Fulaga), and Fiji - Lau

Outlier score: 3.75/5 (Kabara, n = 4 corals with an outlier score). The share of those corals whose molecular stress profile was an outlier, rescaled to 0-5 (5 = no outliers); an island-level measure (Mayfield et al. 2017), not a Coral Health Index.

Country

Fiji

Survey date(s)

2013-06-14

Coordinates

-18.9545, -178.9874

Coral cover

24%

± 5.7% SE, n = 5 transects · Benthic transects+photo-quadrats

Observations

cyanobacteria

Heat stress

Most recent heat load record

25.8°C 0.0°C-weeks

26 Oct 2026 · No heat stress

5-year thermal stress load

5-year mean max. degree heating weeks (DHW)

8.9°C-weeksⁱ

2021–2025

NOAA Coral Reef Watch — Fiji virtual station

i 5-year mean max. DHW is the mean of the annual maximum DHWs over the five complete years named above, not conditions today.

More info

Fiji (NOAA CRW virtual station)

Site summary

Read this summary in:

A Kabara fore-reef station, dived to 30.2 m, with 24% coral against much more algae. No photographs exist; the expedition's notes for Kabara's fore reef describe spur-and-groove terraces steepening around 15 m, and Anderson's sheet records Pocillopora damicornis as absent here. Surveyed on the Living Oceans Foundation's Global Reef Expedition.

Max. depth dived

30.2 m

dive-log maximum

Water temp. during survey

26.5°Cⁱⁱ
CTD-cast midpoint; the cast read 26.5°C throughout

-0.7°C vs the 2013 mean sea temperature (27.2°C)

ii Station CTD-cast midpoint (LOF metadata), not a dive reading: the Living Oceans Foundation station metadata for Fiji give the CTD cast at FJKA33 on 14 June 2013 a maximum of 26.50°C and a minimum of 26.46°C; the value shown, 26.5°C, is their midpoint.

Bottom time

55 min

in at 08:01

Two other CRD dive sites with their own pages within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.

🗺 Detailed map of the Global Reef Expedition dive sites, Kabara, Fiji (Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation; opens in a new window)

Site description

Setting

FJKA33 is a deep fore-reef station off Kabara in southern Lau, surveyed on 14 June 2013 during the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation's Global Reef Expedition. 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, and a slope that becomes very steep around 15 m with many small to medium acroporids and Pocillopora. Anderson's sampling sheet records Pocillopora damicornis as absent at this station.

Coral cover

Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
An in situ point-count transect (station CTD cast to 37.2 m) recorded 24% live coral cover against 57% total algal cover, algae holding roughly two and a half times the substrate coral did.
Transect mean 24 ± 5.7% 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 5.0% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral; they carry no bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns field. Recent thermal exposure at the Fiji virtual station has averaged an annual maximum of 8.9 degree-heating-weeks over 2021-2025 (NOAA Coral Reef Watch), above the 8 DHW level at which severe bleaching and mortality are expected — stated as context a decade after this survey, not as a condition on the day.

Comparisons with other data

Apart from the Living Oceans Foundation survey shown here, we found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. If you would like to share yours, please email us.

Dive record

Bottom time was 55 minutes.

No underwater photographs from this station are on file.

Data & links

Data are from the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition, Coral Reef Diagnostics, and NOAA Coral Reef Watch.