Alor - Bakalang Jetty

Setting

A muck/jetty site over dark volcanic sand and rubble with old wooden pilings (e.g., Image 3, Image 15).

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General benthic features

Two frames show the pilings themselves, encrusted top to bottom in orange, red, and cream tube/encrusting sponges, with a black bushy growth (consistent with black coral, Antipatharia), a translucent lavender ball-cluster of eggs or a colonial ascidian, a delicate white gorgonian sea fan hanging below one crossbeam, and a diver with a slate/pointer working the structure; visibility in these frames is workable but hazy/particulate, typical of a silty muck site (e.g., Image 21, Image 27, Image 46, Image 48).

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On the sand/rubble bottom between pilings, a branching thicket hosts small blue-and-yellow damselfish (photo not shown), alongside a dense low mound of finger-like beige coral with purple-tipped branches and a separate low staghorn-type cluster; sponge-covered rock blocks (e.g., Image 13) and a red branching colony carrying a black crinoid (e.g., Image 54) also sit on the bottom.

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A large sea anemone with long, white-tipped tentacles shelters a juvenile domino damselfish (compatible with Dascyllus trimaculatus), a damselfish that, like anemonefishes, often lives among anemone tentacles (e.g., Image 55).

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Scattered hard corals included branching Acropora, massive Porites, fungiids, merulinid brain corals, and large-polyp forms compatible with Euphyllia (e.g., Image 39, Image 50, Image 53).

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The pilings were heavily colonized by orange, red, and blue sponges, hydroids, crinoids, and soft corals, creating vertical habitat above sand and rubble (e.g., Image 23).

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Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 7.6% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 51 of Anderson's unedited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table. Part of this dive was over muck: the photographs pool coral with dark volcanic sand, rubble, and jetty pilings that is not reef, so the value describes that mix, not the cover of a reef.

Stressors

One large-polyp hard coral colony was paling (partial bleaching): its tentacle crowns were pale cream-white over still-pigmented tan tissue (e.g., Image 56).

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Litter: two printed plastic snack wrappers lay on the bottom, one among coral beside a giant clam (e.g., Image 11) and one in the rubble below a sponge (e.g., Image 18).

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No disease or physical damage is visible on any coral colony in this sample.

Fish and other fauna

Close macro frames show: a spectacular Chromodoris-type nudibranch (black body, orange-rimmed white-and-black banded mantle, orange gill plume) on pink encrusting sponge/coralline rock; a burrowing/feather-duster-type tube anemone with pale tentacles fringed in maroon dots around a dark mouth; a colorful anemone shrimp (red-and-white banded) clinging to a burrowing cerianthid's tube alongside pale green branching coral tips; a dark, elongated sea cucumber lying across rubble; and two macro shots of massive brain-type coral surface detail, one closeup with a distinct grass-green polyp coloration and the other pale cream-green with visible septal ridges, neither showing bleached white tissue or lesions (e.g., Image 20).

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Macro subjects included conspicuous chromodorid and phyllidiid nudibranchs, among them a Phyllidia varicosa-type form, plus anemones and small cryptic fishes (e.g., Image 17, Image 33, Image 35).

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Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, one independent station, WWF-US / WWF-Indonesia at station 5003, 3.41 km away, read 24% 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.