N. GBR - Green (AU96119)

Setting

As a Marine National Park (Green) Zone, this reef is open to divers and snorkelers on a no-take basis.

General benthic features

The reef built from a dense mix of Isopora, Pocillopora damicornis, P. verrucosa, and P. acuta, Stylophora pistillata, and lush Acropora thickets, with recruitment running strong throughout (e.g., Image 3, Image 4, Image 5).

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The thickets vary in texture: a blunt-branched, cream-tipped stand grades into finer gray branching in one frame (e.g., Image 9), and a pale gray staghorn stand spreads down the slope in another (e.g., Image 10).

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The mixed pavement is just as dense close in: pink-tipped green branching colonies, knobby cream colonies, blue-tipped corymbose colonies, and small massives packed around a bright green algal clump (e.g., Image 12), bright orange-red meandroid brain colonies wrapped around a cream branching colony (e.g., Image 17), and a round orange-red corymbose colony beside a purple branching colony and small tables (e.g., Image 19).

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A large gastropod shell lay wedged where a tan tabular colony met pink and blue-tipped branching colonies (e.g., Image 7).

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Toward the reef edge, a large tiered massive colony stood beside a staghorn field and upright lobed colonies (e.g., Image 13), and broad horizontal Acropora tables stacked in tiers, a pink bushy colony and a large spiny gastropod shell resting on top (e.g., Image 14).

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Down the slope the same mosaic of massive, corymbose, branching, and tabular colonies continued into deep water (e.g., Image 18, Image 20, Image 26, Image 27), with a reddish-purple table colony standing out among gray-green plating colonies (e.g., Image 24).

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At the base, branching patch heads rose from sand (e.g., Image 21), and in hazier shallow water the cover shifted to knobby corymbose colonies and small massives on turf-covered rock (e.g., Image 22).

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Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• What the data say. Overall cover across the site's point-count survey stood at 36%.
• One transect was scored at this station (36%; n = 1, so no SE; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); it is the expedition's station value printed above.
• What Anderson saw. His field notes call this stop at Unnamed Reef 11-096 a "strikingly beautiful site with high coral cover and diversity" and estimate live coral cover by eye along his own three transects at 40% (19.5 m), 60% (19 m), and 80-90% (10 m) (e.g., Image 1, Image 2).
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Stressors

The one blemish on an otherwise thriving picture: at 20 m, needle coral (Seriatopora hystrix) was flagged as dying or sickly. One close frame shows a patch of staghorn skeleton overgrown with brown turf in the middle of a pale thicket, a small patch of mortality the photograph cannot date or assign a cause to Image 16.

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Fish and other fauna

Fish life was abundant too, described plainly as "tons of small fish." A black-and-yellow polyclad flatworm crept over coralline-crusted rock (e.g., Image 23).

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Comparisons with other data

No prior survey data from this site. If you would like to share yours, please email us.