Alor - Lobang

Setting

Lobang is a night dive off Alor in the Lesser Sundas, made 2 August 2026 to about 20.9 m, and it is a muck site rather than a reef: the substrate in every frame is dark volcanic sand and grit mixed with shell hash and scattered rubble, with the strobe beam falling off into black at the edges. The close-up emphasis limits wider habitat interpretation; this is a nocturnal muck site defined by its macro fauna.

General benthic features

A cluster of bright yellow cup-coral polyps (Tubastraea-type) sits fully expanded on an orange encrusting sponge, feeding in the dark (e.g., Image 1).

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There is almost no hard coral framework in these frames. A night dive over rock, rubble, and sand with sparse coral cover but several distinctive large-polyp corals, including anchor- or hammer-coral forms compatible with Euphyllia/Fimbriaphyllia (e.g., Image 5, Image 6).

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Coral cover

• No coral cover figure is published: strobe-lit macro shots on a non-coral-dominated muck bottom are not planar benthic quadrats, so a point count would not mean anything here.

Stressors

Anderson's dive log entry for this night dive (2 August 2026) carries no notes, so no bleaching, disease, or other stressor is recorded for this station. Region-level context, not an observation at this station: Anderson's notes from the July-August 2026 Alor expedition record no bleaching in Alor, but intensive fishing pressure, with fishing platforms and fish traps even on the most remote islands and very few fish longer than 30 cm. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.

Fish and other fauna

What lives there is what makes the dive. A banded boxer shrimp with long white antennae shelters under the arms of a crinoid, its white-and-red barred legs unmistakable against the sediment (e.g., Image 2).

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A black polyclad flatworm with a rippling gold-margined edge glides across coarse black gravel (e.g., Image 3).

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And a small scorpionfish, mottled pink, red, and yellow and fringed with skin filaments, sits invisible until the light hits it, buried to the eye in silt (e.g., Image 4).

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Macro subjects include an electric-flame-scallop-type file clam (Ctenoides sp.) with a mantle rim bearing long tentacles (e.g., Image 7), a phyllidiid dorid nudibranch (Phyllidia-type) (e.g., Image 8), a large orange-red shrimp (possibly a snapping or pistol shrimp, Alpheidae) (e.g., Image 9, Image 10), and a well-camouflaged scorpionfish.

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Sponges, anemones, and additional small benthic fishes and crustaceans were also photographed.

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.