N. GBR - Pink (AUPE127)

Setting

Water is hazy blue-green in several wide frames, which limits fine detail at distance.

General benthic features

The survey is in the set: Image 1 looks down on low-relief, algal-dark framework with the yellow transect line running across it, thinly colonized and with a lot of crusted bare rock.

1

From there the frames divide into the healthy inventory and the trouble. Image 3 is a striking golden-yellow foliose colony of stacked whorled plates on open pavement — the Turbinaria growth form Anderson's notes record. Image 4 is a close view of a massive with large polygonal, thick-walled corallites in a honeycomb mosaic, ringed with pale septal teeth, sitting against red encrusting sponge and pink coralline. Image 11 and Image 13 both show mounded and lobed tan colonies with golden branching fire coral (Millepora) fanning up between them and bright green algal tufts wedged in the gaps; Image 13 adds black feather stars. Image 12, the best single-colony frame, is a close view of slender lilac-pink branching Acropora over a lavender encrusting base with a dark crinoid alongside. Image 5, Image 9, and Image 10 are wide frames of mixed, patchily occupied slope in dimmer, greener light.

341113125910

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• The LOF transects recorded 58% live coral cover across three depth strata. Anderson's notes describe the 5-7 m band as built on massive Porites and a Montipora resembling M. capitata, joined by Turbinaria, Lobophyllia, and several Acropora.
• Transect mean 59 ± 3.7% SE (n = 6 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

Crown-of-thorns starfish and recent coral mortality both appear in the set. Image 2 is a full-grown crown-of-thorns starfish, blue-gray with orange-tipped spines, sprawled across live substrate at close range; a second crown-of-thorns sits in the middle of Image 6, its arms spread over pale framework between lobed colonies — two individuals photographed, consistent with the three Anderson counted here, one of them directly on a transect. Image 7 shows a vast field of thin staghorn branches running to the limit of visibility, the framework standing, tan-cream to gray in the hazy light; whether it is living or dead in growth form cannot be settled from the frame, and no percentage is put on it here.

267

Another frame (Image 8) shows partial mortality on a single colony: a broad plating colony with short brown columns rising from its surface, where wide areas of the plate between the columns are bare chalk-white skeleton while the column bases still hold pigment — consistent with the Montipora Anderson logged at this site, though the genus is not asserted from the photograph.

8

No bleaching in the paling sense is visible in the set, and no disease lesion is discernible. Anderson's notes also record large patches of rubble at 8 m, some from storm damage and some dead corals in growth form (COTS damage), red cyanobacteria on his 21 m transect, and cyanobacteria on his 20 m transect.

Comparisons with other data

No other surveys have been conducted at this site to date. Within 5 km, one independent station, AIMS manta tow at PEARSON REEF, 0.83 km away, read 10–32% between 1995 and 2023.

Other notes

The 13 posted frames are all reef imagery.