Acropora cervicornis Feb 1, 2019
According to a report by R. MacLean and H.A. Oxenford on surveys of Acroporoids on the west coast of Barbados in the summer of 2015, “although no A. cervicornis colonies were found on the fringing reefs surveyed in this study, several colonies are known to exist in the deeper patch reef area immediately seaward of some of the fringing reefs (e.g. Vauxhall reef, see annotated photographs of D. Patriquin at: http://versicolor.ca/reef/).
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Photo Jan 31, 2019
The GPS on my camera wasn’t working well. The approximate location is shown below.
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UPDATE July 1, 2023: In the Vauxhall Reef area this past winter I observed healthy Padina, but not on the reef flat where it had once been abundant, rather it was on rocks near shore in the beach area.
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Going through my recent and older photographs of the reef flat on Vauxhall Reef, I realized that Padina sanctae-crucis was absent in my recent 2019 photos, but was present in photos taken in each of the winters of 2015,2016, 2017 and 2018. So
I checked the area out over the last couple of days, and also traversed nearby fringing reefs over about 800 m towards the north.
Nada.
I don’t know what that means, but on Jan 30, 2019 asked on the CORALL Facebook page whether anyone else has noticed the plant recently.
It’s not necessarily bad, for example, the loss of P. sanctae-crucis might be due to increased feeding by nearshore herbiverous fishes.
The first place I head for when I return to Barbados is a little section of the Vauxhall Reef where in 2015, I found some colonies of Acropora prolifera, the Fused Staghorn Coral I always wonder” Are they still there? They were/are and seem to be thriving, still.
Here’s an example:
