Fiji - Vanua Balavu (FJVB56)

General benthic features

A hand holds a numbered tag beside a fist-sized branching colony, one that teammate Joao sampled (Anderson's photo; it is not F125, the colony Anderson sampled), its stubby lobed branches olive-brown and studded all over with pale, evenly spaced polyps — tissue fully pigmented, no bleaching, no lesions, no predation scars (e.g., Image 1).

1

Everything around it is algae. Bright green tufted and feathery macroalgae crowd in from the right, chains of green calcareous discs stack up along the edges of the frame, and green filmy growth covers the pavement between the colony and the pale rubble behind. A thin-branched, green-pigmented colony occupies the left background. What the frame shows is a healthy individual coral holding a small patch of hard substrate on a reef where fleshy and calcified algae have taken most of the space — which is exactly the picture the survey numbers give.

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• Coral cover here measures just 16% by point-count survey against roughly 80% algae, and the one published photograph is a fair portrait of that balance.
• Transect mean 16 ± 2.3% SE (n = 4 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean.

Stressors

Anderson's sample sheet records the one colony sampled here (F125, P. damicornis) as healthy, with none of it bleached. The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 7.0% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral; they have no bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns field. Island-level context, not an observation here: the expedition's Vanua Balavu site notes record crown-of-thorns predation at station FJVB55 and possible crown-of-thorns feeding scars at FJVB67.

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

No wider view of the site was available in this photo set. Anderson was busy sampling corals at this site, so the site description is derived from the Living Oceans Foundation's benthic transect data. Those transects recorded 16% hard coral cover. Anderson sampled 1 Pocillopora colony here, numbered 125 in the expedition series. Anderson's own photographs of F125 are not shown; the one published frame shows a colony Joao sampled, so the transect data, not the photograph, describe the site.