Fig 1.
Survey locations in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (red dots) and the Coral Sea Commonwealth Marine Reserve (blue dots). Map produced with data files courtesy of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and “www.deepreef.org” under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CCAL) CC BY 4.0.
Table 1.
Details of surveyed locations including the site names, survey dates and coordinates (latitude and longitude).
Fig 2.
Presence/absence diagram of coral genera over depth across 15 survey sites on the Great Barrier Reef (top row) and Coral Sea (bottom row).
Colours indicate different growth forms (blues = plating, greens = encrusting/plating, browns = solitary/free-living and yellow = branching) and shades indicate different taxonomic groups. For the benthic substrate, steepness is indicated with different shapes and dominant substrate type is indicated by colour (SGR = sand/gravel/rubble; SCL = sediment-covered limestone; SCL dominated = sediment-covered limestone dominated with some exposed limestone present; L dominated = exposed limestone dominated, but some sediment-covered limestone present). Grey horizontal “snow” means no transect performed at those depths.
Fig 3.
Video stills from benthic video transects.
(a) Green macroalgae (genus Cladophora) covering a Montipora colony at Tydeman Reef at 70 m depth. (b) Monostand of fragmented Goniopora encountered at Osprey Reef HW around 70 m depth, interrupted by small sand patches and sediment-covered limestone. Close-up of colony inserted in left bottom corner. (c) Deep Leptoseris community consisting of small (<20 cm) individual corals at Yonge Reef at 120 m depth. (d) Limestone outcrop at 70 m extending down to ~90 m depth supports large plating and encrusting corals at Holmes Reef. (e). Montipora coral with two free-living fungids at Holmes Reef (80 m depth). (f) Leptoseris hawaiiensis coral at Bougainville Reef at 107 m depth (with ROV video overlay).
Fig 4.
Short-term temperatures over a 10–100 m depth range for 7 of the study sites.
Average temperatures (°C ± SD—indicated with arrow bars) at 10, 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 m depth expressed relative to 10 m mean temperatures. Note the different measurement durations (22–48 hrs) and different months in which the temperature data was collected.
Table 2.
Zooxanthellate scleractinian coral species collected at lower mesophotic depths (60–125 m) on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and in the Coral Sea (CS).