Alor - Goat Fence

Setting

Alor Kecil, Goat Fence — one dive on 28 July 2026, worked from roughly 20 m up a steep, structurally complex slope into water shallow enough that the surface ripples fill the top of the frame. Visibility was good but the light drops off quickly down the slope, and the deeper frames are blue-shifted enough that color-dependent identifications there are weaker.

General benthic features

The photographs sort into three clearly different zones. The shallow crest and upper slope is the coral-dense end: continuous beds of corymbose and tabulate Acropora in brown, purple, and gold, staghorn thickets with bright white growing tips, digitate Acropora and Pocillopora in lavender and blue, foliose Montipora and folded golden Turbinaria plates, and big toadstool leather corals (Sarcophyton) sitting among them. Carpets of pulsing Xenia/Anthelia soft coral cover whole stretches of the reef top, and orange anthias and damselfishes hang in clouds above them. The mid-slope is the most diverse ground in the set and reads as a mosaic rather than a monoculture: laminar and whorled plates consistent with Echinopora and Pachyseris speciosa (one colony a meter across in fine concentric ridges), massive Porites domes, large meandering brain corals consistent with Platygyra and Symphyllia, honeycomb Favites/Goniastrea, free-living Fungia mushroom corals scattered throughout, clusters of anchor/hammer coral (Euphyllia) with tan hammer-tipped tentacles, and at least three separate fully-inflated bubble corals (Plerogyra sinuosa) photographed close (e.g., Image 21, Image 43).

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Sponges are present but secondary — black and olive barrel sponges with open oscula, red and orange encrusting crusts, and a few blue-gray branching forms. The deeper slope inverts the picture: soft corals (Dendronephthya, Sinularia, more Xenia), whip corals, and small gorgonian bushes take over, red fleshy macroalgae and turf mat large areas, magenta crustose coralline algae binds the rock, and broad bands of pale rubble and sand run between the colonies. Several deep frames are frankly low-cover — open pavement and broken branching rubble with widely spaced colonies — and a few show standing dead Acropora skeletons still in growth position.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 11% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 72 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.
• Worth noting alongside that figure: this site's frames span an unusually wide range of habitats, from near-continuous Acropora on the crest to bare rubble at depth, so any single site-level cover number is averaging over genuinely different reefs.

Stressors

Condition is mixed: at least four colonies in the set are stark, fully bleached white (a foliose plate beside an intact green neighbor, a small colony in the shallow Xenia field, and two pale gray-white encrusting-plating colonies on the mid-slope). A handful of others carry small chalk-white patches of freshly exposed skeleton. Against that, the great majority of colonies photographed are fully pigmented and structurally intact; no crown-of-thorns, no bite scars, and no reef-wide bleaching front appear anywhere in the photographs.

Fish and other fauna

Invertebrate life is conspicuous: two giant clams (Tridacna) with speckled and green mantles, groups of magnificent anemones (Heteractis) with anemonefish, a carpet anemone, a blue Linckia sea star, black, white, gray, and vivid yellow-green feather stars on almost every high point, Diadema and other urchins, sea cucumbers, and a large solitary polyp with a deep red rim and pale oral disc consistent with Cynarina lacrymalis.

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.

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.

Other notes

Man-made content is limited to divers and their gear, one wrist dive computer, and one wrist watch photographed against a table Acropora; a small pale rectangular object on a sand ledge in one deep frame may be litter but cannot be resolved.