Philippines - Apo Island (Negros)

Setting

Apo Island lies off southeast Negros Oriental, reached by bangka from Malatapay pier on the mainland.

Coral cover

• No coral-cover estimate exists for this site from Anderson's own surveys, and neither computer vision model has been run, because there are no underwater frames to run them on.

Stressors

Because there is no benthic imagery, bleaching, disease, recent mortality, and crown-of-thorns are not observable here rather than absent, and no coral genus can be assigned from these photographs.

Comparisons with other data

Reef Check's Apo Island Marine Reserve station, logged at two positions about 120 m apart, is the closest Reef Check station, 0.18 km from this pin (an area placement for the island, not a logged position): yearly means from 1998 to 2003 between 12% and 61% hard coral, with 13% recently killed coral and no nutrient-indicator algae; its 2003 value, the mean of two surveys, is 50%. Its two positions run in opposite directions: the one 0.18 km away went from 61% in 1998 to 33% in 2003, while the one 0.30 km away rose from 53% in 1999 to 68% in 2003. These are independent Reef Check measurements, not CRD surveys of this site; the 0.18 km position's 1998 value (61%) is the mean of its two surveys on 12 September 1998, at different depths. Apo's community-managed sanctuary has a documented management history, with published studies on export of adult fish biomass (1996), on spillover (2003), and on recovery of the reserve two years after an El Niño bleaching event (2002). These Reef Check figures come from nearby independent surveys, not from a survey of this site.

Dive record

Anderson's own dive log records three dives here on 18 February 2013: "Chapel" at 09:15 (21.3 m maximum, 25.0°C, 9.1 m visibility) and "Rock Point" twice, at 11:50 (18.0 m, 23.9°C) and 15:00 (17.1 m, 24.4°C). Anderson's log describes the Chapel dive, just off shore from the main beach, as starting among plentiful coral bommies in 4-5 m, crossing a deep wall, and ending in a hard and soft coral garden "that was possibly the nicest I've seen", with extremely high diversity and coral cover and about 10 turtles sleeping among the soft corals. At Rock Point Anderson logged a reef "absolutely blanketed with corals", a forest of hard and soft corals with lettuce coral and tabular and branching acroporids in murky water, dense fish schools, a black and a white frogfish together, and fluorescent polychaete worms; the afternoon dive there added two sea snakes and numerous turtles.

Other notes

No underwater photographs were taken here.