In the year 2000, the Mediterranean and Tropical Ecology and Biology Laboratory started a program that studies the coral recruitment in French Polynesia. Today this survey is managed by the SO CORAIL.
For this program, three benthic life stages for scleractinians are studied: adult, juvenile and recruit.
- Adult colony: when they are capable of sexual reproduction (length greater than 5 cm)
- Juvenile colony: centimetric length, but sexually immature (from a few months to a few years old)
- Recruits: millimetric length, most often cryptic (invisible to the naked eye), usually from several days to several months old.
In this work, adults and juveniles are identified to the genus level. For recruits, we distinguish three families (Acroporidae, Pocilloporidae and Poritidae). The recruits that do not belong to any of these families have been classified in "other family" (autre famille) and those too damaged to identify in a "broken" (cassée) family.
Adults and juveniles survey has been active for 14 years (last campaign in March 2014) whereas recruits survey is still ongoing since 2000.
Coral recruits history
Information table about artificial substrates: TableauInformation RC.xlsx