Fiji - Vanua Balavu (FJVB62)

Setting

FJVB62 sits on the Vanua Balavu lagoon and was worked over two days, 23-24 June 2013, during the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition; the dive reached 18.3 m. Visibility was clearly poor, which is probably why the camera went to macro.

General benthic features

The only two frames with any spatial reach look down through a milky, sediment-laden water column onto pale sand and rubble patched with dark algal-crusted framework, a reef shark cruising low across both and a yellow damselfish holding near the reef edge (e.g., Image 15, Image 21); they are too hazy to settle relief, zonation, or how the coral is distributed here.

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The close-ups record what was present rather than how much of it. Image 22 fills entirely with the surface of a massive coral head, hundreds of round, evenly spaced, fully pigmented corallites in orange and olive-green, each with a pale central mouth; Anderson identified the colony as Diploastrea (a field identification).

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Image 25 and Image 23, identified as bubble coral, show its vesicles inflated over framework crusted with pink coralline algae, green segmented calcareous algae, and green algal tufts.

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Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• The in situ point-count transect recorded 30% live coral cover against 43% algal cover, and those figures — not the photographs — are the quantitative account of the site.
• Transect mean 30 ± 4.5% SE (n = 4 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean.

Stressors

No lesions or crown-of-thorns damage appears on the corals in these frames, but a handful of subject portraits and two turbid wide shots cannot support a site-wide condition assessment. Anderson's sample sheet records two of the four colonies sampled here as partly pale (F136 '20% pale/bleached though likely healthy'; F137 '30% pale', its bleached part sampled), and the frames of F137 show that paling, with pale pink-white outer branches over brown interiors (e.g., Image 8, Image 9, Image 10).

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The one coral colony from this site with an outlier score was not flagged as a physiological outlier (Mayfield et al. 2017, PLoS ONE). The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 8.0% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral.

Fish and other fauna

Image 16, Image 19, Image 18, and Image 17 are four frames of one large fleshy anemone — Anderson's word for it — a smooth mauve-gray fluted disc with a raised central mouth ringed by blunt pale tentacles over a dark oral disc speckled with pale tubercles, worked from several angles and distances.

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Image 24 is a spotted sea cucumber lying across red-crusted framework with green algal growth around it.

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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.

Dive record

FJVB62 was dived twice, and the photographs from it swing between very tight and very wide.

Other notes

The photographs are a macro set, not a survey set: near-identical anemone frames and a Diploastrea close-up would misrepresent the reef if read as a sample of it. Four Pocillopora colonies were sampled here, F135, F136, F137, and F138, the last labeled P. acuta in Anderson's own records; one of them, F136, was host to a small commensal crab photographed three times among its branches (e.g., Image 5, Image 6, Image 7).

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Those colony frames describe the colonies, not the reef.