Miller and Muller, 1999:

"The manta tow technique is a tool for the rapid visual assessment of coral reefs at the scale of reef or section of reef. It involves towing a snorkel diver at a constant speed, behind a small boat, using a rope and a manta board (a hydrodynamic plane angled by the diver's arms to control depth). One tow consists of a 2 minute interval, then the boat stops and the observer records indices of benthic cover and counts of Acanthaster planci (crown-of-thorns starfish or COTS). Historically, the technique has been used to characterise reefs at several sites throughout the Indo-Pacific (e.g. Chesher 1969; Roads 1971; Devaney and Randall 1973; Endean 1974) and extensively for surveys on the Great Barrier Reef (e.g. Endean and Stablum 1973; Kenchington and Morton 1976; Moran et al. 1991). More recently, with the acceptance of the method as a standard technique for the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (UNESCO 1991), there has been added interest in the use of manta tow as a tool for monitoring and assessment of coral reefs globally.

Small-scale, site-specific alternatives to the manta tow technique, (e.g. SCUBA swim searches, live transects and quadrants), supply information about relatively small areas and are regarded as more valid (i.e. the absence of systematic error) and reproducible (i.e. the absence of random error). The potential loss in validity and reproducibility of the manta tow technique, however, may be offset by the fact that by manta towing, a larger body of information about a wider area is obtained. Counts of target organisms can be calibrated to swim search counts to provide, where necessary, absolute measures of abundance (De'ath 1992; Moran and De'ath 1992). Furthermore, on a broader scale, manta towing, based on simple logistics is generally more cost-effective than the respective photographic and spectrographic alternatives (Bainbridge and Reichelt 1988; Green et al. 1996; Mumby et al. 1997; Mumby et al. 1998)."

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Citation and/or URL

Miller, I. & Muller, R. 1999, Validity and reproducibility of benthic cover estimates made during broadscale surveys of coral reefs by manta tow, Coral Reefs, 18: (4) 353-356

Spatial Coverage

Great Barrier Reef

Temporal Coverage

Not applicable

Update Frequency

Not applicable 

Other Information

None