N. GBR - Blue (AUR517)

Setting

This is a Habitat Protection (Blue) Zone, where line fishing is permitted.

General benthic features

This leeward bommie field on Ribbon Reef No. 5 stacks up in bands with depth: weedy soft corals cloak scattered bommies around 20 m, a high-relief pinnacle of branching acroporids rises from 13-14 m, and the reef crowds to within 1.5 m of the surface, where Pocillopora damicornis and P. verrucosa grow in abundance. One frame shows a single massive Porites dome a couple of meters high standing clear of the surrounding pavement, its lobed surface green in the ambient light with one vivid green patch and a skirt of small colonies at its base (e.g., Image 4).

4

Others look across the shallow mosaic: pale corymbose Acropora thickets and yellow fire coral on a slope edge dropping into blue, sweetlips and damselfish working the crest, and broad fields mixing mounding Porites, pink Pocillopora, and tabulate Acropora (e.g., Image 1, Image 2).

12

A close-up catches a foliose plate coral of the Turbinaria type, tan with widely spaced round corallites (e.g., Image 3).

3

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• Point-count cover across the site reached 37%.
• Transect mean 37 ± 10% SE (n = 2 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is the expedition's station value.

Stressors

No bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns starfish were reported here.

Fish and other fauna

The dive's most memorable moment was an extremely aggressive sea snake that actually attacked one of the divers.

Comparisons with other data

No other surveys have been conducted at this site to date. Within 5 km, seven independent stations (Reef Check and XL Catlin Seaview Survey) recorded 7.0–53% hard coral cover between 1999 and 2017; the nearest, XL Catlin Seaview Survey at transect 12036, 2.10 km away, read 11–17% between 2012 and 2017.

Other notes

The field report's station table gives this code a Lizard Island mid-shelf position that belongs to AULK22 (its rows for 5-6 September 2014 are shifted by two stations); the pin uses the 933-site table's position on Ribbon Reef 5, where Anderson's notes place this dive.