Fiji - Totoya (FJTO08)

Setting

The whole eleven-frame set says the same thing about this station's shape: it is flat. Six frames (e.g., Image 2, Image 3, Image 4, Image 5, Image 7, Image 9) look out across a broad, low-relief terrace that runs unbroken to the limit of visibility, with no build-ups, spurs, grooves, or vertical structure anywhere in view.

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General benthic features

Image 5 and Image 4 look along it into blue water; Image 7 is a hazy view over a wide rubble-and-pavement plain sloping very gently away with only scattered small colonies in the foreground; Image 2 is the same ground closer in. On that terrace the community is low-growing and set into the pavement rather than raised above it. The recurring elements across Image 5, Image 4, Image 2, Image 3, and Image 9 are pale mint-green and gray-green plating and encrusting colonies (Image 9 has several), olive and tan massive colonies, small brain corals with meandering valleys, low Porites-type lumps, cream to tan digitate and corymbose colonies, loose branch rubble, and broad sheets of maroon-red and pink coralline crust with small green algal tufts through it. Image 3 is the closest and most occupied view of that ground; Image 9 is a slightly deeper, greener version of it with the mint-green plating colonies prominent. Four frames are colony portraits. Image 10 is a large golden-tan brain coral filling the frame, its surface a dense mesh of fine sinuous valleys, clean and in visibly good condition.

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Image 6 is a rounded olive-green massive dome sitting in coralline-crusted rubble.

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Image 11, an acroporid Anderson left unidentified, is a cream, thick-branched, blunt-tipped colony among red coralline crust and green turf; it is not named further here.

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Image 8, identified as P. damicornis, is a close frame of a pale tan verrucose branching colony filling the view, with a crimson-red encrusting patch behind it.

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Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• Coral cover 36%, from the LOF-GRE in situ benthic transect (this station's own transects in the expedition's per-transect benthic data) — a diver transect, and the authoritative figure for this site.
• Transect mean 36 ± 5.1% SE (n = 6 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean. The per-transect file also lists four transects labeled FJTO09 under this station's code; they belong to FJTO09 and are left out of both values (the expedition's 933-site table had pooled them with this station).

Stressors

Nothing in the eleven frames shows disease lesions, crown-of-thorns feeding scars, or anything man-made, and no divers, boats, or open-water frames appear; Image 1 is sampled colony F17, tag in hand.

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None of the three coral colonies from this site with an outlier score was flagged as a physiological outlier (Mayfield et al. 2017, PLoS ONE). The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 7.5% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral; they carry no bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns field.

Comparisons with other data

Apart from the Living Oceans Foundation survey shown here, we found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, seven WCS Fiji via MERMAID stations recorded station-year means of 36–64% hard coral cover in 2011; the nearest, WCS Fiji via MERMAID at TY10, 2.81 km away, read 53% in 2011.

Dive record

Totoya, Lau Archipelago, dived 5 June 2013.

Other notes

What the frames cannot settle: depth is not recoverable frame by frame; the haze in Image 5, Image 4, Image 2, and Image 7 limits identification at distance to growth form; and Anderson left the acroporid in Image 11 unidentified.

Survey team's site notes for Totoya's fore-reef sites (island-wide; not specific to this flat station). Small mounds of hosting diverse mixed coral assemblages may be present. At greater depths, colonies take on plating morphologies and form a series of shingle-like structures. Prominent macroalgae include Halimeda, Caulerpa, and Dictyota. High coral cover, with large spur and groove ridges. Sediment filled grooves, with large pieces of rubble. Fore reef sand flats benthic cover is usually very low because the substrate is mobile and largely unconsolidated thus inhibiting colonization by benthic organisms. In some cases, large Porites lobata colonies and tabular acroporids occur within the sand flats, especially in deeper areas (30-50 m). Macroalgae become more common with depth due to the abatement of wave energy with increasing depth. The deeper fore reef habitats at the base of the reef were generally low relief sand flats, mostly uncolonized. Often there were sparse assemblages of cyanobacteria and small patches of macroalgae, along with isolated larger corals.