Fiji - Moala (FJML22)

Setting

Nineteen frames survive from FJML22 (Moala, Lau Archipelago, 10 Jun 2013); seven are wrist shots of Anderson's dive computer (a Suunto), one of which reads 28.9 m with a water temperature of 27.1°C, and they are not shown on this page. The survey team's notes place FJML22 among the east-side stations (FJML23, FJML15, FJML22, FJML16), on the fore reef slope.

General benthic features

This is a sampling record, not a photographic survey. Seven of the nineteen are wrist shots of Anderson's dive computer, and nine more are hand-held numbered-tag frames composed tightly on one colony each; only three are wide views of the reef: Image 1, Image 2, and Image 3.

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The tag frames document the colonies Joao sampled. Nothing in the set was shot to characterize habitat, and it should not be read as though it were. The three wide frames show a coralline-crusted, coral-veneered reef top of low to moderate relief. Image 1 looks across a bottom carpeted almost continuously with small colonies — short branching and digitate heads, olive and tan encrusting and knobby forms, a dark red-brown massive at left and a smooth olive dome at center — with a diver working over it and a pink-and-white sampling cylinder resting on the substrate. Image 2 is an oblique view up a coral-built ridge whose surface is a mosaic of small branching, digitate, and encrusting colonies over pavement, falling away into blue on the left. Image 3 is the widest and cleanest of the three: a low, rubbly, coralline-crusted pavement carrying well-spaced small branching and corymbose colonies, tan and olive knobby heads, and scattered tabular plates, with a diver in the blue above. The tag frames are the substance of the set, and they are sampling documentation. Each shows a gloved or bare hand holding a numbered tag against a single colony: Image 4, Image 5, Image 6, Image 8, Image 9, Image 12, Image 13, and Image 15.

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Where the strobe reached the subject the colonies are legible — Image 8 and Image 15 are the best images at the site, both showing a compact, heavily verrucose olive-to-mustard branching colony set on vivid pink and crimson crustose coralline algae, compatible with a pocilloporid; Image 6 and Image 4 show finer, more openly branched knobby colonies compatible with Acropora; Image 9 sets a fine green branching colony among broad blue-gray foliose plates; Image 13 places a branching colony directly on a massive whose finely pitted surface is compatible with Porites. These are frame-level identifications offered as 'compatible with' only. There is no scale reference in any frame, so no colony dimension in this set is measured.

Survey team's notes for the east-side stations. Large colonies of Porites and Diploastrea were common on the sides of the slope. Small colonies of Platygyra, Lobophyllia, and Echinopora were common.

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• 29%, from the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation's in situ transect survey (Global Reef Expedition site data); the photographs illustrate the site.
• Read together, these are consistent with the surveyors' account of a fore-reef slope with build-ups on massive framework rather than a continuous coral carpet, though three frames cannot establish zonation, relief, or community proportions.
• On the east side, coming up the slope from 32 m, coral cover was not very high, but CCA was common.
• Transect mean 29 ± 3.4% SE (n = 5 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean.

Stressors

On condition, the frames settle very little and should not be pressed. No bleached colony is identifiable anywhere in the set, but with sixteen of nineteen frames strongly color-cast and only three showing the reef at all, that is a statement about the imagery and not about the coral population; no bleaching percentage was read off it. No disease lesion or predation scar resolves either, so the Culcita feeding damage the surveyors recorded on table and plating corals at other Moala stations is neither confirmed nor contradicted here. The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 3.4% 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. If you would like to share yours, please email us.

Dive record

FJML22 (Moala, Lau Archipelago): surveyed 10 Jun 2013 during the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition.