N. GBR - Green (AUMO101)

Setting

Global Reef Expedition station AUMO101 on Monkman Reef, far northern Great Barrier Reef (-11.4565, 143.1428), surveyed on 20 September 2014 on that day's third dive.

General benthic features

The notes record the reef starting around 13.5 m and improving shallower — by 5-8 m, Pocillopora damicornis, Stylophora pistillata, Goniopora, and massive Porites were thick on the slope, with soft corals throughout and notably abundant fish. One frame shows a bushy orange-brown branching colony beside pale branching colonies, cup-shaped leathery soft corals, and a patch of red encrusting growth on silty rock, with sand beyond (e.g., Image 1).

1

The survey transects, all between 9 and 10.5 m, carried more modest cover but real species richness, typically 15-20 coral species per 50 m line, with one line running directly over a large Diploastrea colony.

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• The in situ benthic transects recorded 44% live coral cover against a 20% algal fraction on a dive to 15.7 m, more than double the algal fraction.
• One transect was scored at this station (44%; n = 1, so no SE; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); it is the expedition's station value printed above.

Stressors

The 9.4 m transect over a large Diploastrea colony also carried dead Seriatopora hystrix; the same dive produced the trip's first S. hystrix recruit. Regional context only: surveyed about eighteen months before the 2016 mass bleaching, an event that severely bleached hundreds of reefs on the northern Great Barrier Reef (Hughes et al. 2017); 5-year mean annual maximum thermal stress at the Far Northern GBR virtual station is 11.1 degree heating weeks. The 2014 dive notes for this site record one Culcita cushion star, a coral-eating sea star (Anderson's GBR field notes, 2014).

Comparisons with other data

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