Abstract
Photographic line transects were used to quantify the benthic community at Hall Bank, a small, nearshore, high-latitude reef in south-west Australia. On one of the seven transects, the coral cover was 72.5% (mean = 52.6 ± 0.45%), which is the highest ever recorded coral cover at or beyond 32°S. There were no macro-algae, possibly due to the high density of herbivorous sea-urchins (mean = 5.0 ± 0.8 m−2). Fourteen species of scleractinian corals dominated the benthos, seven of which were from the family Faviidae. Given that Hall Bank is at the limit of environmental tolerance for reef formation, it represents a valuable research opportunity for understanding the factors that build and maintain coral reef biodiversity and resilience.
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Acknowledgments
We thank F. Graham and D. Bearham for field assistance. J. Fromont for providing access to museum records. J. Eagle, J. Keesing, R. Babcock and three anonymous reviewers for helping to improve the manuscript. We also thank CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans Flagship and the Western Australian Marine Science Institution for supporting this research.
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Communicated by Biology Editor Dr. Andrew Baird.
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Thomson, D.P., Frisch, A.J. Extraordinarily high coral cover on a nearshore, high-latitude reef in south-west Australia. Coral Reefs 29, 923–927 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-010-0650-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-010-0650-1