Philippines - Cebu (Moalboal)
Part of the regional summaries: Philippines - Visayas and Philippines
2013-02-11
More info
Eastern Philippines (NOAA CRW virtual station) · Eastern Philippines ecoregion mean=7.5°C-heating weeksEight independent survey stations shown with the program’s logo — click one to see how far it is from this site.
Site description
Setting
The Moalboal marker sits on the Panagsama Beach shorefront on the southwest coast of Cebu, facing Negros across the Tanon Strait and stands for four dives logged with Blue Abyss over 10 and 11 February 2013.
General benthic features
They show the configuration the log describes: a narrow, shallow, sandy-to-rubble flat running up to a beachrock and rubble margin, green algal or turf tone over the intertidal platform, and an abrupt shift from pale turquoise to deep blue within a very short horizontal distance. Several frames read a mottled bottom in roughly half a meter to two meters of clear water, but no colony is resolved and no genus is offered.
Coral cover
No coral-cover estimate exists for this site, and neither computer vision model has been run on it.
Stressors
Nothing bleached, diseased, recently dead, or crown-of-thorns-affected is visible, which is a limit of the imagery rather than a finding. Shorefront development is dense and built to the waterline, and moored bangkas are numerous.
Comparisons with other data
Three further stations within 2 km run from 11.9% to 31.9%, so the external figures describe this coast rather than these dives. No coral-cover value exists for this site.
Dive record
"Sambaguita" on 10 February ran to 19.2 m over 68 minutes with 15.2 m visibility, most of it on a wall at about 10 m, and the log records that in 3 to 4 m at the end of the dive the bottom was near-continuous coral for as far as he could see, mostly branching Porites. "Pescador Island" the next morning was a wall dive to 32.0 m over 63 minutes with 19.8 m visibility, logged with abundant Montipora in the shallows, turtles, a small frogfish, and a scorpionfish. "Talisay" that afternoon, 22.3 m over 60 minutes, is the dive he rated best of the trip for coral, close to continuous cover for most of its length and genus-rich, with poritids, agaricids, acroporids, pocilloporids, fungids, and gonioporids all logged. A night shore dive on the house reef followed, 10.1 m over 65 minutes, with a juvenile blue-ringed octopus, squid, two turtles, and decorator crabs.
Other notes
All 19 photographs in the iCloud folder were reviewed and all 19 are topside.
Dive history
| Date | Time in | Max depth (m) | Bottom time (min) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-02-10 | 13:45 | 19.2 | 68 |
| 2013-02-11 | 09:15 | 32.0 | 63 |
| 2013-02-11 | 14:00 | 22.3 | 60 |
| 2013-02-11 | 18:15 | 10.1 | 65 |
Independent surveys nearby
Within 5 km, 8 independent survey stations recorded hard coral cover in 28 surveys between 2005 and 2007. Of the 5 stations surveyed in more than one year, 1 declined, 2 increased, and 2 changed by less than 5 percentage points between their first and latest surveys. The longest record, Poblacion East (Reef Check, 1.91 km away), went from 29% in 2005 to 32% in 2007. The most recent nearby survey is from 2007, so these values predate recent heat stress.
Collected by other programs using different methods (Reef Check uses point-intercept transects), so these are context for the figures above, not a like-for-like comparison. Where a station was surveyed more than once the range is shown. Station names are not dive-site names.
| Agency | Site / location | Date | Hard coral cover (%) | Distance | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reef Check | Banlot Tongo Basdiot | 2005–2007 | 17–20% (4 surveys) | 1.69 km | — |
| Reef Check | Poblacion East | 2005–2007 | 28–32% (6 surveys) | 1.91 km | — |
| Reef Check | Poblacion West | 2005–2007 | 21–38% (4 surveys) | 1.98 km | — |
| Reef Check | Saavedra Site 1 | 2005 | 44% | 2.81 km | — |
| Reef Check | Saavedra Site 2 | 2005 | 41% | 2.82 km | — |
| Reef Check | Tomonoy | 2005–2007 | 14–31% (6 surveys) | 3.45 km | — |
| Reef Check | Tongo | 2006 | 12% (2 surveys) | 1.91 km | — |
| Reef Check | Basdiot (North) | 2006–2007 | 51–56% (4 surveys) | 2.18 km | — |
Data & links
Data on this page are from the organizations named in the data-sources table above, not Coral Reef Diagnostics; Coral Reef Diagnostics has no survey of its own at this site.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.