Fiji - Totoya (FJTO06)

Setting

Totoya's FJTO06 is a lagoon channel and patch-reef station (Anderson's sample sheet: lagoonal patch reef/channel, extremely surgy), photographed down a steep face, and the site has essentially one usable wide photograph.

General benthic features

That frame looks obliquely down the slope through hazy water: a continuous, knobbly carbonate framework — old lobed and encrusting heads, ridges and small overhangs — sheeted in mauve, purple, and rust crustose coralline algae and turf, with live coral present as separate patches set into that surface rather than as a closed coral canopy (e.g., Image 1).

1

Small yellow-green digitate and corymbose branching colonies and low clumps of what appear to be pocilloporids are the obvious live pieces; a dark-barred sweetlips-type fish holds against the rock at the upper edge, and the blue of open water falls away to the right (e.g., Image 1). The other habitat frame is a tagged-colony close-up: an orange-and-yellow cattle tag cable-tied to a bare boulder beneath a pale mauve-and-cream branching colony with bright white branch tips, growing out of maroon-red crustose algae (e.g., Image 3).

3

Anderson identified the colony as Pocillopora damicornis.

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• Coral cover: 12%. Live hard coral measured on in situ benthic transects during the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition (LOF-GRE in situ transects; mean of all of this station's own transects).
• Transect data are this site's authoritative cover value; nothing in the photographs overrides it.
• Transect mean 12 ± 2.3% SE (n = 4 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean.

Stressors

Tissue on that one colony looks intact, with no lesions in view — a statement about that colony only, not about the reef. Anderson's sampling sheet records fish bites on two of the colonies sampled here (F8 and F10). The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 0.8% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral; they carry no bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns field.

Comparisons with other data

FJTO06 (Totoya, Lau Archipelago) was surveyed on 4 June 2013 during the Global Reef Expedition. Five Pocillopora colonies (F8-F12) were tissue-sampled here for the mission's molecular work, three of them recorded as P. damicornis on Anderson's sample sheet (F8, F9, F10) and two as an unidentified Pocillopora not processed (F11, F12). Typical recent thermal stress: mean annual maximum of 8.9 degree heating weeks (2021-2025, NOAA CRW; Fiji virtual station).

Other notes

The frame is too hazy and too oblique to settle zonation, relief, or the depth range of the slope, and a single wide shot cannot describe condition site-wide.