Alor - Ampera

Setting

A night dive on a gently sloping black-sand and rubble habitat with sparse attached benthos, isolated sponges and anemones (e.g., Image 12, Image 20, Image 28).

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Visibility in the lit subjects is workable but the frames are otherwise black night-dive backgrounds typical of a single focused strobe; no bleaching, disease, or physical damage is assessable given the near-absence of scleractinian coral in this sample. One man-made object lies on the sand: an old tire, its rim now colonized by brown and pale soft corals (e.g., Image 52).

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General benthic features

Sessile life is sparse and dominated by non-scleractinian invertebrates rather than hard coral: several tube anemones (Cerianthidae) extend dense crowns of fine, pale cream-to-pink tentacles from burrows in the sediment — Image 9 shows one fully expanded with well over 100 tentacles radiating from a central mouth, and Image 37 shows a green-tentacled color morph of the same family; Image 14 shows a broad, frilled disc anemone or corallimorph with translucent, ribbon-like marginal tentacles over a pale central disc; a separate and unrelated organism in Image 46 is a green anemone-like disc with black blotched markings and a crown of short olive tentacles, growth form and coloring not confident enough to name to genus (e.g., Image 2, Image 9, Image 14, Image 19, Image 37, Image 39, Image 46, Image 48).

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Image 50 is a close frame of ribbed mantle tissue, brown-and-cream papillae surrounding a green, finely ridged siphon visible through the shell gape, consistent with an exposed giant clam (Tridacna) mantle rather than a coral (e.g., Image 47, Image 50).

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A wire/whip coral (cf. Cirrhipathes) grows in a loose spiral with small white star-shaped polyps extended in Image 49, and Image 11 shows a similar branching whip-like colony with dense white polyps and brittle-star arms wound around the stem (e.g., Image 11, Image 49).

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Image 34 shows red-maroon feather stars (crinoids) conspicuous on the rock face, arms fully extended for feeding, alongside long black sea-urchin spines and patches of red and orange encrusting sponge (e.g., Image 34).

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Image 38 shows a small cluster of cream-and-pink stalked polyps (colonial tunicates or zoanthid-type polyps) on rock.

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Fish and other fauna

Image 34 also shows a small, mottled black-and-yellow moray eel coiled among the crinoid's arms, and a green, iridescent bobtail squid (Sepiolidae) sits exposed on open sand (e.g., Image 1).

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Images 5 and 8 (two angles of the same animal) show an orange-and-white mottled fish with large, paired bulging eyes and huge, fan-like pectoral "wings" banded in black and pale blue, held open beside a barrel-sponge- or mushroom-coral-like round structure — this could be a flying gurnard (cf. Dactyloptena orientalis) or the site record's previously noted frogfish/scorpionfish-type ambush predator; the identification is not certain from these frames alone (e.g., Image 5, Image 8).

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A second, distinct fish in Image 43 is a solid orange animal with a stout head, fused paddle-like pectoral fins, and warty skin, consistent with a frogfish (e.g., Image 43).

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Sea cucumbers, nudibranchs, crinoids, and additional small crustaceans also occur (e.g., Image 10, Image 27, Image 29, Image 31, Image 41).

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Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. If you would like to share yours, please email us.