Now more than ever when an inordinate amount of our corals are coming from Australia, it’s quite refreshing to get a reminder of corals from the Solomon Islands, one of the corners of the infamous coral triangle. Visiting this part of the world gives us a glimpse at a super diverse range of corals just on one single reef dive.
In our previous video from this location, we did a long power snorkel around the shallows coming up with plenty of corals, fish, clams and colonies to saturate our reef aquarium senses. Shortly after we dove the same site at Nugu Beach and swam down to the bottom of the reef slope, encountering loads of wild coral colonies in their natural environment.
You can clearly see the habitat divide between the shallow water and deeper water corals, and especially how still the water movement can be down at the bottom. Mind you this is not a particularly deep reef within this enclosed lagoon, adding to the stillness of the water at a depth of 80 feet.
If you’re familiar with even half of these corals and species then you’ll begin to see a pattern with where the corals grow, what species are found next to them, and especially the position and orientation of the corals. In the aquarium hobby corals are lumped into really broad categories but as you can see from this nice natural reef dive video, corals don’t follow our aquarium guidelines which is specifically why we go out of our way to dive and document our previous polyped friends at the source.
