Alor - Harilolong (School's Out)

Setting

An exposed, current-swept slope whose upper edge falls away into open blue — the frames repeatedly look off the lip into dark water, and dense open-water shoals of fusilier- and surgeonfish-shaped planktivores hang there, which fits the site's nickname (e.g., Image 38, Image 52).

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A long exposed slope with open-water access and highly variable benthic cover (e.g., Image 16, Image 51).

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General benthic features

The dominant substrate is a low-relief pavement almost completely veneered in brilliant magenta and red crustose coralline algae, with the coral community growing as encrusting and plating sheets on top: lavender and olive encrusting coral plates, green and gray scroll-shaped plating corals, ridged plating corals, and large concentric plating colonies with pale growing margins (e.g., Image 8, Image 22, Image 25, Image 28).

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Interspersed are meter-plus table corals with white or electric-blue growth edges, dense mounds of blue-lavender digitate corals, bushy and small branching colonies, cream finger corals, hemispherical massive domes, fleshy large-polyped corals in brown and vivid green, brain corals, a well-photographed ruffled plating colony, and free-living mushroom corals (e.g., Image 15, Image 20, Image 24, Image 27, Image 29).

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Cryptic-community close-ups show purple didemnid tunicates, green Halimeda, and red, orange, and blue encrusting sponges. Sponge fauna includes red, pink, and brown barrels, yellow tube clusters, and one macro frame of a small commensal shrimp inside a pink barrel (e.g., Image 43).

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Sand-floored pockets carry fields of pink-brown soft coral, finger leather corals, and mushroom-shaped leather corals, and isolated bommies stand on white sand (e.g., Image 14, Image 34).

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The reef top carries a near-continuous staghorn and corymbose coral thicket across its whole area, tens of meters wide, with clouds of dark planktivores above (e.g., Image 4, Image 10, Image 19, Image 45).

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Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 36% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 275 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

Condition is good — no widespread bleaching, only small patches of exposed skeleton on a few plate colonies and normal grazing scars. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.

Fish and other fauna

Feather stars (black, yellow, cream), gorgonians, hydroid plumes, and a blue Linckia laevigata recur (e.g., Image 9, Image 26).

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A banded sea krait (Laticauda-type) was seen crossing an encrusting colony — the only reptile recorded on the dive. Fish include anthias in the thousands, Heniochus bannerfish pairs, butterflyfishes, damselfishes, and blue-green chromis. Anthias, chromis, and fusilier-like planktivores formed numerous small-to-moderate schools, with surgeonfishes, butterflyfishes, and parrotfishes also present; the very large pelagic aggregations the site is known for were not consistently captured (e.g., Image 31).

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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 5002, 1.64 km away, read 8.0% 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.