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← All lessons Lesson 10 of 19 · 1 min

Flags, not diagnoses

Beyond bleaching, a frame may show breakage, sediment veneer, overgrowth, predation scars, or tissue lesions of unclear origin. Those are recorded as condition flags attached to the point and its class.

Why they are never named: coral disease identification generally needs expertise, and often laboratory work, beyond anything a photograph can support, and several conditions with quite different causes look alike in an image. A misidentification entered into a record propagates. It gets read by people who were not there, cannot be checked against the animal, and is very hard to retract once somebody has summarized it elsewhere.

This is Reef Demographer's identification rule in another domain: a higher-level observation you are sure of beats a specific one you guessed.

Quick check

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Generated from the Reef Chronicler Student Handbook, version 0.04. The course documents are the authority; if these pages and they ever disagree, the documents are right.