Fiji - Vanua Balavu (FJVB52)

General benthic features

Nine frames look along and up a steep slope edge dropping into blue water (e.g., Image 21, Image 18, Image 19, Image 26, Image 25, Image 17, Image 23, Image 20, Image 22).

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The slope shoulder is densely built: Acropora in most of the growth forms the genus manages, with pale tables cantilevered out over the drop (e.g., Image 26, Image 17, Image 22), corymbose cushions and staghorn stands packed against each other (e.g., Image 21, Image 18, Image 25, Image 23), and smooth tan massive boulders and knobbly mounding heads set among them (e.g., Image 18, Image 26, Image 25, Image 17). Color through this set runs pale lavender, cream, tan, and pink-brown, with green encrusting and plating growth, and maroon and red algal and coralline patches filling gaps (e.g., Image 21, Image 26, Image 25, Image 23). Bare rock is uncommon in the frames shot along the shoulder; the two frames looking across flatter ground (e.g., Image 12, Image 13) show a more open mosaic with rubble and pavement between colonies, so the reef is not uniform across the station.

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Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• Transect mean 47 ± 4.3% SE (n = 5 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean.

Stressors

No wide frame shows an obviously bleached or recently dead colony; a few dark, algae-covered dead branch sections are the only visible mortality, and no crown-of-thorns or disease lesion is identifiable; Anderson's sampling sheet records one of the four colonies sampled here (F112) as 5–10% bleached and the other three at 0%. Of the three coral colonies from this site with an outlier score, one (33%) was flagged as a physiological outlier (Mayfield et al. 2017, PLoS ONE). The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 9.4% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral.

Fish and other fauna

Planktivores — damselfishes, chromis, and anthias — hang off the slope face in almost every wide frame, densest in Image 20 and Image 25. A whitetip reef shark passes low over the reef top (e.g., Image 14) and a shark with a remora attached cruises over open sand in blue water (e.g., Image 16).

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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

The complete set contains both the wide survey photography and the close-range colony photography from the physiological sampling on the same dive, and the two are easy to confuse. Six frames are shot at arm's length on individual branching colonies (e.g., Image 6, Image 4, Image 3, Image 9, Image 5, Image 11).

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One of them (Image 3) shows a numbered plastic tag on a wire loop fixed into the framework beside a colony, which is the marker for a physiologically sampled colony; the number itself is not meaningful and is not recorded here. The tagged and photographed colonies are branching colonies in cream, pale tan, and gray-white (Anderson's sample sheet lists only Pocillopora here: P. acuta and P. damicornis), several with polyps fully extended (e.g., Image 9, Image 11). The colony in Image 11 is cream-white with tan bases and fills the frame. These are strobe-lit macro-range frames of individually selected colonies, and pale rendering at that distance cannot be separated from paling of the tissue; no wide frame in the set shows white colonies, and nothing here should be read as an extent of bleaching at this station. Their value is as a visual record tying this site to the physiological sampling: of the three colonies here with an outlier score, one was flagged as an outlier. Two frames carry a diver: a photographer on the slope face beside a coral Anderson identified as a mushroom coral (fungiid) (e.g., Image 24), and a diver working over a dark sand-and-rubble floor on a dive Anderson noted for its strong current (e.g., Image 15).

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What the frames cannot settle: none of these is a planar downward view and the slope frames are strongly oblique, so nothing in the set supports a cover figure. The set is also weighted toward the best-built part of the slope — the two flatter-ground frames are a useful corrective. Depth is not resolvable from the imagery.