Little Conch (FKNMS)

Setting

Little Conch is an Upper Keys offshore reef and the fourth of Anderson's NOAA/FKNMS research sites, with colonies tagged and genotyped by the NOAA AOML team in July 2017, which Anderson resampled in 2019. It mattered to the study as "the lone offshore site with enough disease-free colonies for coring".

General benthic features

The frames show a reef of isolated Orbicella faveolata mounds standing on largely dead pedestals — a living tan cap on top, the flanks below given over to algal turf, red encrusting sponges, and rubble — set on low hardground with mustard-yellow mounding colonies, sea plumes, sea fans, and open sand between them.

Coral cover

• Coral cover: 6.9% (August 2016), from the NOAA NCRMP and NOAA AOML photo-transect survey of this reef published by Manzello et al. (2019, Global Change Biology) — 40 frames on two 10 m transects, point-counted. The two deeper Upper Keys offshore sites read 1.5–1.6%, and the 3.3% figure in that study is the average of all three, not this reef.

Stressors

A frame noted as an Orbicella faveolata being smothered shows a clump of red-brown filamentous algae in a fold of a live coral colony, and Anderson's log records the reef "being smothered by macroalgae" (10 July 2019) and "being smothered by algae" (4 December 2019). On 21 August 2019 Anderson logged "some incidence of bleaching", and the sampled colonies that day show sharply bordered pale zones beside green-brown tissue (partial bleaching). A frame noted as a lesion on tagged colony LC-3128 shows a tissue-loss margin with bare skeleton beside brown tissue on a tagged colony (e.g., Image 6).

6

No corallivores were evident.

Comparisons with other data

Apart from the NOAA survey shown here, we found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, 45 independent stations recorded station-year means of 0.0–36% hard coral cover between 1996 and 2024; the nearest, NOAA NCRMP at FLK-248, 0.44 km away, read 6.0% in 2015.

Dive record

Anderson logged four dives here in 2019 (10 July, 21 August, 9 October, 4 December; 5.8–6.1 m maximum, long bottom times of 33 to 62 minutes, 25.7–31.0°C (dive averages)).

Other notes

The photographs are working shots, not scenery: nearly every frame has a fluorescent hammer, a mesh collection bag, or a numbered dive slate in it. Several colonies are so heavily and repeatedly cored that Anderson likened one to Swiss cheese.