We have completed the FR3 site and are about two thirds done with the FR9 site. If all goes well, we will finish up with FR9 with two dives tomorrow morning. That only leaves FR7 which is the furthest away on the north shore of Palmyra. It is also where we expect to find a high number of tiles missing due to the storms Palmyra experienced in 2015. This is based on my comparing the photomosaics that Scripps made of part of our study site before and after the storm. I can not find a single unique coral head that I can use to sync the two images. I see some of our plates in the post-storm photomosaic, but in almost all cases one of the two paired plates can not be found in the image.
For the most part, there is a lot more filamentous red algae on plates with caging. This is because the larger fish can't get in there and eat it. The uncaged tiles usually have very little algae except crustose coralline algae. That said, we had at least one plate that was in a cage that was more barren than most of the uncaged plates.
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| caged tile showing lots of filamentous red algae compared to uncaged tile |
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