[Coral-List] some good coral news

[BRUCE CARLSON]

“Blue Acropora of Mane Island” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjYxrrZAdNo

With all the gloom and doom about coral bleaching the past two years, I would like to share a good news video story about one coral colony that my wife and I have been observing periodically over the past 23 years in the Solomon Islands.  We went back to the Solomons last December and snorkeled over to this reef with some trepidation wondering if the reefs in this area had succumbed to the recent world-wide bleaching events.  Fortunately, this reef was unaffected.  In fact, we saw no evidence of bleaching anywhere in the Solomon of December 2015.

This short video is partly a story about this particular colony of Acropora yongei, but I also realized when I was viewing the video that there was another embedded story.  I set up the GoPro 4 camera and just let it run recording 4K video.  At first, there are only a few fish in the scene, but within a few minutes both the number of species and biomass of fishes increases significantly.  I counted 36 species and later in the last frame I found one more making the fish tally 37 species.  That is a lot of species captured in one small “window”.  The list of species appears at the end of the video.  

Who knows how long these Solomon Island reefs will continue to persist, but at least for now they are thriving.

Bruce