Korolevu Island in Somosomo Strait

Korolevu Island is a small, unpopulated islet located about ½ way down the west coast of Taveuni Island, about a kilometer from shore. With a nice sandy beach on the south side of the island, many people venture here via kayak or boat to lounge, picnic, snorkel, or dive. Just off shore from the beach, there are mounding porites coral and staghorn thickets, but if you want to see this coral garden, you must venture over to the north shore.

In my experience, Korolevu ranks as one of the top 3 spots in northeast Fiji for hard coral gardens. But what distinguishes Korolevu from these other two dive spots (which are NukuReef and Broken Reef), is the size of Korolevu's table corals. For example, the table you are seeing here is an astounding 4 meters wide and this is but one of hundreds. Looking up from the bottom of the coral you can see that it is not structured like a solid plate. The table coral grows like a horizontal tree branch that splits into side branches every few centimeters. These side branches fuse and intermingle with other side branches -- creating an open latticed structure. This openness is a great benefit to the table coral -- water passes easily between the branches -- allowing the table's carnivorous polyps to feed on passing plankton. The other great benefit of the open lattice is that it sometimes prevents the table from acting like a sail during strong storm surges -- but not always.

Korolevu Islet is a classic example of a reef located relatively close to a hungry population center. You've probably noticed by now that there is a complete absence here of schooling game fish (such as fusiliers) and larger fish, such as grouper, coral bream, and snappers. Even the butterflyfish and parrotfish, which should be chomping away at this spectacular hard coral reef, are few and far between. The only common fish on this reef are those in the damsel family. It should be interesting over the next few years to see if this absence affects this wonderland.

While diving this reef, I stayed at Paradise Taveuni, a great boutique resort on the south tip of Taveuni Island. Guests at Paradise Taveuni dive with Taveuni Dive, a most excellent dive operator. Both companies can be found on the internet.

For those that can generally identify hard coral species, I'd be most appreciative if you could name them with the clip time frame in the comments section.

Filmed with a Sony HDR-XR520 with a Amphibico housing.