Multispecific synchronous coral spawning on Pulau Bidong, Malaysia, South China Sea

[Extract] Multispecific synchronous spawning appears to be a feature of all speciose coral assemblages (Guest et al. 2005) having now been reported from at least 25 locations in the Indo-Pacific (Baird et al. 2015). Nonetheless, there are many aspects of coral spawning that remain poorly understood, and many regions for which there is little data. In particular, there are few records of coral spawning from the South China Sea. Information on the timing of coral spawning is also important for the effective management of human activities such as coastal development (Baird et al. 2011). Here, we document multispecific synchronous spawning of scleractinian corals on Pulau Bidong (5°37´N, 103°03´E), an inshore island on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia