N. GBR - Green (AUR704)

Setting

This is a no-take Green Zone: look, dive, photograph — but nothing leaves the water.

General benthic features

Thirteen frames from Ribbon Reef No. 7's intermediate-exposure flank, and they are consistent with the seascape already on record: isolated coral heads set in open white sand rather than a continuous reef. One frame looks down through clear blue onto that pattern directly — pale sand with dark bommies scattered across it and a fish crossing the gap (e.g., Image 1).

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The strongest structural frames are each filled by a large massive Porites dome, lobed and knobbly, several meters across, with smaller colonies, and a fluted colony packed at its base and small planktivores hanging over it (e.g., Image 10, Image 11).

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One frame shows the survey itself: a diver holding the PVC quadrat frame up against the flank of an isolated coral head, with open sand on either side (e.g., Image 4).

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The close frames show what the bommie surfaces actually carry. Three are dense mixed assemblages — tan and cream corymbose and digitate Acropora, purple-gray branching colonies, encrusting sheets, small massives, and low soft corals, packed over crusted framework with very little clean space (e.g., Image 3, Image 5, Image 6).

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In a crevice between heads, a cloud of small glassy baitfish hung between a cream branching Acropora and a lilac leathery soft coral (e.g., Image 2).

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Soft corals are a real presence here rather than a footnote: in one frame, tan and cream branching soft corals ring a vivid purple branching hard coral and a lilac finger-shaped colony (e.g., Image 7), and at the sand line, small white soft corals flank a lilac branching colony and pale knobby massives (e.g., Image 12).

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Three frames catch colonies growing right at the sand margin: a tufted brown branching colony spread across the sand (e.g., Image 8), a stand of staghorn Acropora at the foot of a tall bommie (e.g., Image 9), and a pale branching Acropora stand on sand (e.g., Image 13).

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Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• Coral cover 44%, from the LOF-GRE in situ point-count transects (Global Reef Expedition site data, 933 sites); it is not derived from these photographs.
• Algal cover 38% from the same transect.
• Transect mean 45 ± 6.5% SE (n = 3 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is the expedition's station value (the headline weights each depth equally; one depth had a single transect).

Stressors

Most coral in the set is normally pigmented. The exception is the pale branching stand on sand, which is partly bleached: its outer branches are pale to white with polyps still visible, while the shaded interior stays brown; it is one colony in one frame, and no extent is estimated (e.g., Image 13). Nothing else in the set shows obvious lesions, and no crown-of-thorns seastars are visible.

Fish and other fauna

Anderson's notes for this dive also record a garden-eel patch, an enormous (2 m) Spanish mackerel, and an impressively large (3-4 m across) massive Porites.

Comparisons with other data

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

Other notes

What the frames cannot settle: depth, and how much of the bottom is sand. Every frame is framed on a coral head or on the survey, so the set gives no basis for judging the sand-to-reef ratio at this site — which is exactly the quantity the transect measures and the photographs do not.