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ANIMALSO
Breeding

Mother and Daughter Find a Giant Coral Colony off Cairns—but Is It the World’s Largest?

Sophie Kalkowski-Pope and Jan Pope reported a huge Pavona clavus colony offshore from Cairns. Its preliminary measurements are remarkable, but its possible world-record status has not been confirmed.

By Animalso Team 3 min read

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A mother-and-daughter dive team reported finding a *Pavona clavus* coral colony offshore from Cairns, with preliminary measurements of 111 metres long and 60 metres wide. Its estimated footprint is 3,971 square metres. The colony could be the largest documented and mapped coral colony in the world, but that claim has not been confirmed: the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority was investigating, according to ABC News.

How did a mother and daughter find the colony?

Sophie Kalkowski-Pope and her mother, Jan Pope, were recreational divers participating in the Great Reef Census, a citizen-science program run by Citizens of the Reef. Their find was not an intentional search for a record-sized coral: they came across the colony while surveying the reef.

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The pair returned with Citizens of the Reef to document it more thoroughly. They used drones and measuring tapes to map and measure the colony and create a 3D model. Those follow-up measurements produced the preliminary dimensions reported by ABC News.

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Where was the coral found?

The colony is offshore from Cairns in Far North Queensland, on the Great Barrier Reef. Its exact position has not been disclosed. Kalkowski-Pope described the area as tidally dominated and difficult to dive, which she thought could help explain why the colony had not been found earlier. The discoverers said they were sharing stewardship information with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority; the location should not be treated as an invitation to seek out the site.

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How big is the reported coral colony?

The preliminary measurements put the colony at 111 metres long and 60 metres wide, with an estimated footprint of 3,971 square metres. These are reported measurements, not a separately published or independently verified scientific record.

The report also gives two comparisons cited by Kalkowski-Pope: a coral in the Solomon Islands was described as 34 metres along its long edge, while one at Nusa Penida was described as 71 metres across. Those figures describe different dimensions, and the report does not establish that all three were measured using the same method. They cannot be used as a standardized ranking against the Cairns-area colony.

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Is it confirmed as the world’s largest coral?

No. The report says the colony could be the world’s largest documented and mapped coral colony, and that the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority was investigating. It does not report a final authority finding or a peer-reviewed survey confirming a global record.

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Kalkowski-Pope said, “We know for a fact that definitely here on the Great Barrier Reef, nothing has been discovered to this scale before.” She also said, “Even globally, to find a coral over 100 metres in size … there’s no record of it.” These are the discoverer’s assessments as reported by ABC News, not the result of a formal worldwide comparison. A claim about the largest colony ever found is also different from proof that no larger, undocumented colony exists.

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How old might the colony be?

Mike Emslie, a research scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, estimated that a colony of this size could be at least a couple of hundred years old, as quoted by ABC News. That is an estimate, not a direct age measurement reported for this colony.

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Why does its survival matter?

Emslie said that finding a large, long-lived colony still standing would be significant in a reef exposed to repeated disturbances such as mass coral bleaching, cyclones and crown-of-thorns starfish. He described the find this way: “It indicates that these large, long corals are still standing up in the face of repeated acute disturbances like mass coral bleaching, cyclones and crown-of-thorns starfish.”

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That is a cautious interpretation of why large colonies matter, not evidence that this particular colony escaped those impacts. Emslie said he could not confirm whether the exact site had been surveyed before because he did not know its precise location.

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