The reason these corals are healthy is due to water temperature and the lack of First World influence.

They aren't fished commercially. There is subsistence fishing. Up to now no one cared about these reefs in an international dialogue. They need to be protected and the people of the islands supported through any medical help they need to improve their quality of life. That comes as a mission and not a profit motive.

23 December 2019
By Shreya Dasgupta

Mass grouper spawning aggregation in French Polynesia. 

Over the course (click here) of seven months in 2012 and 2013, more than 70 scientists collaborated to study and map the coral reefs around the islands of French Polynesia in the South Pacific.

This was a huge undertaking. Researchers covered over 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles), including places never studied by scientists before. They conducted nearly 4,000 coral reef and fish surveys in 264 dive sites across 29 islands, and mapped over 9,300 square kilometers (3,590 square miles) using satellite imagery. No other coral reef survey in French Polynesia has been conducted at this scale, said Renée Carlton, a marine ecologist with the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation.

Findings from this massive expedition, published in a new report, offer hope. At the time of the surveys, French Polynesia had one of the world’s healthiest coral covers, and some of the highest diversity and density of reef fish on the planet.

The surveys were part of the Global Reef Expedition (GRE), a global mission supported by the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation that aimed to map coral reefs around the world.

“The goal of the Global Reef Expedition was to collect as much data as possible on the status of coral reefs, given the rapid changes we are seeing to reefs around the world,” Carlton told Mongabay. “Having a baseline understanding of the status of coral reefs is important for scientists and managers alike.”...