Fiji - Matuku (FJMT13)

Setting

In the frames visibility is moderate, with a soft blue haze over anything past a few meters; Anderson's notes call the water murky.

General benthic features

The photographs show why the number reads lower than the eye expects: the framework is dense but the living veneer is patchy, with pink and mauve crustose coralline algae sheeting over most of the old skeletal rubble between colonies (e.g., Image 1).

1

Small tabular and corymbose Acropora plates sit scattered across the ridge top alongside stubby Pocillopora heads and low mounding colonies, a few table plates already broad enough to shade the pavement beneath them (e.g., Image 5).

5

Rusty-red and olive turf and fleshy algae fill the hollows, matching the high algal fraction logged here (e.g., Image 3).

3

One frame follows the slope down into blue water, the reef falling away as a near-vertical wall of coral and coralline pavement; a rectangular survey quadrat is visible clipped to the reef in the upper corner (e.g., Image 4).

4

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• On the Matuku fore reef (station CTD cast to 19.2 m), the GRE team worked a broad, coral-crowded ridge that point-count survey put at 26% living cover.
• Transect mean 26 ± 5.2% SE (n = 4 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean.

Stressors

A young, untagged branching colony is pale and partly bleached (e.g., Image 6); no disease or crown-of-thorns damage is apparent in these frames, and Anderson's sample records for the dive list six colonies, one of them very pale and about 80% bleached and another about 20% bleached.

6

Of the five coral colonies from this site with an outlier score, one (20%) was flagged as a physiological outlier (Mayfield et al. 2017, PLoS ONE). The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 13% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral on the transect lines.

Fish and other fauna

Damselfishes hover in loose clouds over the crest, a pair of butterflyfish work the branch bases, and parrotfish drift along the edge (e.g., Image 2).

2

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.

Other notes

Survey team's site notes: Visibility was poor, with a fair amount of suspended sedimentation. Large branching acroporids with some recent mortality was common. Drupella snails were found on several colonies which could account for some recent mortality scars on the acroporids. Plating Pachyseris and Echinopora colonies common at base of slope.