Philippines - Port Barton, Palawan: island-hopping stop 2

Setting

Port Barton, Palawan — the second island-hopping snorkel stop of 2017-01-21, further out along the outer sandbars than stop 1. Across the 20 frames the habitat is a shallow, high-relief reef flat and upper slope of hard framework and rubble, shot in natural light against a blue mid-water background; visibility is good but slightly green-hazy in the wider shots.

General benthic features

Coral architecture is genuinely varied. Two frames are dominated by broad tabulate Acropora tables a meter or more across, one photographed from above with upright axial corallites around a pale, partly abraded center and one shot from below against open blue (e.g., Image 1, Image 15).

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Arborescent staghorn Acropora forms extensive thickets in several frames, some with pale purple-tinted branch tips and small damselfishes and anthias hovering over them. A third register is plating and foliose: whorled, tiered plates compatible with Montipora and Echinopora stacked in shingle-like banks, one striking colony with a vivid violet growing margin, and a large cabbage-form colony of overlapping cupped plates (e.g., Image 4, Image 6).

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Massive corals are common — blue-gray Porites bommies, smaller helmet-shaped colonies, and columnar/digitate stands of finger-like Porites in one dense frame (e.g., Image 8, Image 13).

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One frame is a fungiid garden: half a dozen free-living mushroom corals in gray, blue-gray, cream, and pink lying among pink crustose coralline algae beside a massive faviid and a pink massive Porites (e.g., Image 7).

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A bushy brown gorgonian with white expanded polyps occupies one frame, and green calcareous algae and turf occur between colonies throughout (e.g., Image 12).

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Four of Anderson's frames carry the site's main message. One shows a single small cream fine-branched Seriatopora colony isolated in a field of rubble and fleshy algae (e.g., Image 19).

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Another is a near-continuous brown macroalgal canopy over the pavement with one small knobby coral surviving in the middle of it (e.g., Image 17).

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A close view shows the competitive interface — encrusting coral tissue and green-filmed pavement abutting a dense red-brown fleshy macroalgal stand (e.g., Image 18).

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The fourth shows a brown verrucose branching colony of Pocillopora form with two stark-white branches (see Stressors) (e.g., Image 20).

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That is the honest summary of the site: real structural coral — tables, staghorn thickets, plate banks, massives, fungiids — interleaved with substantial pavement and rubble that fleshy macroalgae has taken over.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 39% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 20 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.
• Treat it as provisional.
• Note also that these 20 frames are the same 20 the Claude point count scored, and they are a photographer's selection biased toward the best coral — several frames in the same set show pavement given over to macroalgae, so a swim-through transect here would very likely land lower.

Stressors

No crown-of-thorns, no disease lesions, no physical breakage from anchoring and nothing man-made appear in any frame. One branching colony of Pocillopora form has two stark-white branches: possible partial, colony-level bleaching (one frame, Image 20), not a reef-wide event, and the only sign of bleaching in the set.

Comparisons with other data

Reef Check surveyed a nearby station (Exotic Island), 0.47 km from the pin; we could not confirm that it is the same reef. Within 5 km, eight Reef Check stations recorded station-year means of 15–45% hard coral cover between 1998 and 2019; the nearest, Reef Check at Exotic Island, 0.47 km away, read a mean of 33% in 2019.