Alor - Monaseli (Munaseli)

Setting

Monaseli (Munaseli), northern Pantar — two dives on the same day, and the photographs show two genuinely different habitats, which is why they are described apart. Dive 1 (54 frames) opens on the vertical face.

General benthic features

The first twenty frames are wall: near-black rock in ambient blue, hung with a large pale elephant-ear sponge, deep-red and pink barrel sponges (Xestospongia form) sitting on ledges, gray-green tube and vase sponges, yellow and white gorgonian fans, bushy black-coral colonies, and mauve, white, and cream soft corals of Dendronephthya form. Crinoids in yellow, green, and black perch on every projection. Hard coral on the face itself is mostly encrusting and thin-plating — laminar plates with pale growing margins compatible with Montipora, Echinopora, and Pachyseris — and a green foliose colony with a bright white edge recurs. Above about the mid-point the wall rolls over into a broad deep terrace, and the character changes completely. On the terrace, the ground is pink crustose coralline pavement, white carbonate sand, and dead branching framework, with live coral in discrete patches: fields of gray and cream tabulate Acropora tables stacked shingle-fashion, one large yellow-green tabular plate, a salmon-pink table, corymbose thickets, and isolated bommies carrying stacked tables above massive bases. Dive 2 (126 frames) covers lower-relief terraces, isolated bommies, and white sand channels, and carries visibly more living coral. Tabulate and corymbose Acropora are the dominant architecture — pale gray tables, a salmon-pink table with a white growing rim, mauve and purple corymbose colonies — with large arborescent staghorn stands, deep-red branching thickets, golden-brown bushy colonies, thick-fingered digitate colonies, and gray lobed leather corals of Sarcophyton/Sinularia form. A domed meandroid massive coral sits in a mosaic of red encrusting sponge, purple soft coral, and an urchin. Sponges are again conspicuous: paired red barrel sponges with scarlet interiors, orange tube-sponge clusters, a broad gray sea fan, and pale blue-gray ropy sponges. Between the coral patches, however, are broad expanses of pink coralline pavement, dead branching rubble, and open sand — the site is patchy, not a continuous carpet.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 20% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 178 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

Several frames are largely pavement and rubble with only scattered colonies, and one shows a tabular colony that is stark white along one edge, grading through cream into normally pigmented tissue (e.g., Image 51).

51

No crown-of-thorns and no clear disease lesions were seen in the photographs; a small number of white colonies are the only bleaching-like signal. Two colonies on the second dive carry small, sharp-edged patches of freshly bare white skeleton: several small spots on an olive lobed massive colony and a stark-white patch at the center of a corymbose table colony, with normally pigmented tissue around them. These are small recent-mortality or bite spots, cause unclear (photos not shown).

Fish and other fauna

The water column carries constant fish: clouds of anthias and chromis, yellow pyramid- and other butterflyfishes streaming along the face, fusiliers further out, and divers silhouetted against the surface with reels and camera rigs. Fauna in frame includes a giant clam (Tridacna sp.) with a blue-gray mantle, a parrotfish, a Moorish idol, damselfishes and anthias over the coral, blue damselfishes over the sand, and abundant crinoids.

Comparisons with other data

Wabang (2018) surveyed this site (Munaseli) in 2018. If you have survey data from this site to share, 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 objects are divers, tanks, reels, and cameras, plus the photographer's own fin edge in two frames.