NOAA - White Shoal, Dry Tortugas

Setting

Five meters down at White Shoal, a fixed NOAA Dry Tortugas station — hard coral cover here was 3.3% in the 2021 Dry Tortugas CREMP point-count survey — tracking temperatures from the low 20s to nearly 32°C, the sea floor gives way almost entirely to staghorn coral (e.g., Image 5, Image 10, Image 14).

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It is a shallow station, and the photographs show hazy, backscatter-flecked water and a reef built largely from one fast-growing coral that has weathered catastrophic decline elsewhere in the Caribbean (e.g., Image 1, Image 21, Image 24).

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General benthic features

Wide stands of orange-tan Acropora cervicornis carpet the shallow rubble bottom in continuous thickets (e.g., Image 6, Image 7, Image 9, Image 11, Image 17), growing tips pale the way healthy staghorn tips always are.

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Low mounding heads with tightly packed corallites and a scattering of meandering brain corals fill the gaps between branches, while gorgonian whips lean in at the edges (e.g., Image 2, Image 15, Image 18, Image 20, Image 22).

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Coral cover

• Coral cover: 3.3% in 2021, from the FWC-FWRI Dry Tortugas CREMP point-count survey of the site's 4 permanent stations, the year Anderson dived here; the same stations read 0.5% in 2024.

Stressors

Some live staghorn branches carry red filamentous algae, which Anderson recorded as biofouling. An old, heavily fouled rope lies coiled on the reef around a small branching colony (marine debris). Several whole staghorn branches are stark-white bare skeleton, with clean corallites and a sharp boundary against live orange-tan tissue on the same and neighboring colonies: recently dead branches, cause not recorded (e.g., Image 25).

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No corallivores were evident.

Fish and other fauna

A black long-spined urchin tucks beside an encrusting sponge, and small reef fish move through the branch canopy in loose schools (e.g., Image 8, Image 16, Image 23).

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Comparisons with other data

FWC CREMP (Dry Tortugas, DTCREMP) surveyed this site (White Shoal #411) in 2024, 0.06 km from the pin. Within 5 km, 102 independent stations recorded station-year means of 0.0–49% hard coral cover between 1999 and 2024; the nearest, FWC CREMP (Dry Tortugas, DTCREMP) at White Shoal #411, 0.06 km away, read 0.5–9.0% between 1999 and 2024.