Alor - Babylon

Setting

Dive 1 (1 August 2026): The first of two dives here, on the wall and the complex coral outcrops separated by sand and rubble (e.g., Image 1, Image 4, Image 32, Image 36).

143236

Dive 2 (2 August 2026): The second visit covered a longer progression and a visibly different part of the site.

General benthic features

Hard corals included branching and tabular Acropora, Pocillopora, foliose and encrusting Montipora, massive Porites, Turbinaria, fungiids, and merulinid brain corals (e.g., Image 13, Image 29, Image 38, Image 50).

13293850

Large barrel sponges, leather and other soft corals, gorgonians, crinoids, and red coralline or sponge-like encrusting growth occupied the wall faces and the spaces between colonies (e.g., Image 8, Image 11, Image 14, Image 41).

8111441

Structural complexity and coral cover increased locally toward denser shallow gardens but remained spatially discontinuous. Wall and outcrop habitat again held massive Porites, Montipora/Pachyseris plates, Turbinaria, fungiids, and merulinids with barrel sponges, crinoids, gorgonians, and soft corals — but large later sections crossed a near-continuous field of ruffled foliose (leafy) plate corals before returning to mixed bommies and rubble (e.g., Image 15, Image 21, Image 49); branching colonies grow among them in places (e.g., Image 16).

15214916

This leafy-plate habitat is the reason the two Babylon dives are worth separating.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 30% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 415 of Anderson's unedited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.

Stressors

A few massive colonies were partly bleached on both dives: on 2 August one large rounded colony was cream-white over most of its surface and brown only along one margin, and another had a broad gray-white center inside a brown rim; on 1 August one pale lobe sat beside brown lobes of the same colony (three of Anderson's photographs, not shown). Fishing gear: a woven-bamboo fish trap (bubu) with a bait bag hung on a rope against the wall on 1 August, and long ropes and blue lines, likely trap lines, ran across the reef in several 2 August frames (Anderson's photographs).

Fish and other fauna

Anthias, chromis, other damselfishes, butterflyfishes, and surgeonfishes were the most conspicuous fish groups (e.g., Image 3).

3

Comparisons with other data

WWF-US and WWF-Indonesia surveyed a nearby station (station 5004) in 2014, 0.24 km from the pin. Within 5 km, two independent stations (WCS Indonesia via MERMAID and WWF-US / WWF-Indonesia) recorded station-year means of 0.0–53% hard coral cover between 2014 and 2025; the nearest, WWF-US / WWF-Indonesia at station 5004, 0.24 km away, read 53% in 2014.

Regional context, not a survey of this site: Razak et al. (2026) found no significant trend in hard coral cover around Alor (a decline of 0.6% per year at 23 sites, surveyed by point-intercept transect at about 8–10 m in 2014, 2017, 2021, and 2023 by Yayasan WWF Indonesia); this is a trend for that location, not this site’s cover. Cover at those sites fell by 3% between the 2014 and 2017 surveys, which bracket 75 days of NOAA Bleaching Alert Level 1 from December 2016 to February 2017.

Dive record

Two dives were made here, on 1 and 2 August 2026.