Fiji - Vanua Balavu (FJVB61)

Setting

Visibility was poor to moderate with a blue-gray cast at range.

General benthic features

Anderson's frames from this station consistently show low-relief consolidated framework and rubble, sheeted in pink and mauve coralline crust and darkened by rust-red and olive turf, with pale sand and rubble collecting in the hollows and only small, scattered corals — a few low encrusting and mounding patches and some finely branched heads in the near-field frames.

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• The in situ point-count transect recorded 15% live coral cover against 75% algal cover — the quantitative account of this site comes from that transect, not from the photographs.
• Transect mean 15 ± 3.2% SE (n = 4 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean.

Stressors

The frames are not close enough or numerous enough to assess bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns damage across the site. The survey team's site notes for FJVB61 record a Diploastrea colony at 20 m with a gradient of mortality and what appeared to be a high abundance of trematodes, and note that diseased Porites were also common (Living Oceans Foundation, Fiji site descriptions, 2013). The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 5.5% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral; they carry no bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns field.

Fish and other fauna

Only four habitat frames exist, and all four were taken of a whitetip reef shark rather than of the reef, so the bottom appears in them only as background: two hazy wide frames at range and two closer, strobe-lit frames over a few square meters of rock (e.g., Image 1, Image 2, Image 3, Image 4).

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Comparisons with other data

The one coral colony from this site with an outlier score was not flagged as a physiological outlier (Mayfield et al. 2017, PLoS ONE).

Dive record

FJVB61 was surveyed on 23 June 2013 during the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition, on a dive to 31.7 m.

Other notes

No branching thicket, table or vertical structure appears in any frame, but with four opportunistic shark frames the photographs cannot settle the site's zonation, relief, or community composition, and no site-wide claim is made from them here. One Pocillopora colony was sampled here, colony F134, labeled P. acuta in Anderson's own records; its two close-up frames (not shown on this page) are pictures of that colony and describe nothing beyond it.