Nikko Bay

We went to visit our first site about a week ago, but before we jumped in the water to collect our coral fragments that have been sitting there for 6+ months, we had to get the tanks at PICRC ready to receive all our coral frags from 8 colonies and multiple species.

Nikko Bay is an inshore reef within the Rock Islands of Palau. The temperatures here are much higher and the pH is lower than offshore reefs of Palau. Thus, providing an ideal natural experiment for learning how these corals compensate for conditions expected in the coming decades.

We have two arrays set up in Nikko Bay, our inshore site, to hold our coral fragments that we will use in later experiments to monitor different biometrics of the overall health of the coral.

Here are Robin and Dusty cleaning the arrays and removing the coral fragments. We will take them back to PICRC to be cleaned and weighed, so we have an idea of how much these fragments have grown in the past 6 months.

Look at all of the coral!! 

It is amazing that there is still such high coral diversity and coral cover in a bay area that experiences such high temperatures and a low pH. These resilient individuals may provide insight into the future of coral reef ecosystem dynamics.