Alor - Umapura

Setting

Umapura is a near-vertical wall on the west side of Ternate Island, in the tidal flow of the Pantar Strait, just off the village where the group bought ikat cloth (Anderson's log), with a black volcanic shoreline and a shallow reef flat inshore. The deep half is wall, not slope: overhanging faces and undercut lips shot from below against open blue, and the encrusting community rather than the reef-building corals does most of the covering there (e.g., Image 6, Image 11, Image 22).

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The wall and slope are high-relief, with numerous ledges and overhangs (e.g., Image 29, Image 43).

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General benthic features

Pink crustose coralline algae, red, orange, yellow, and lilac encrusting sponges, tunicates, and turf fill the rock between overlapping plates and whorls, with small hemispherical merulinid heads and meandering fleshy large-polyped heads (e.g., Image 2, Image 8, Image 19, Image 36).

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Filter feeders dominate: maroon barrel sponges of Xestospongia form, gray elephant-ear and vase sponges, blue and purple tube sponges, coiled wire and whip corals, black-coral bushes, gorgonian fans, and feather stars in every crevice (e.g., Image 24, Image 39, Image 46, Image 47).

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Higher up, the profile shallows onto a different habitat: table corals a meter and more across, dense corymbose and staghorn corals, bushy branching corals, encrusting and foliose corals, massive corals, a close-up domed coral with corallites intact, and open fields of mushroom-shaped leather corals, lobed leather corals, finger leather corals, and pink soft coral (e.g., Image 31, Image 34, Image 40, Image 49, Image 50).

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Live coral is patchy, separated by wide pale sand-and-rubble aprons and older dead framework (e.g., Image 35, Image 38).

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Live cover was moderate to locally high and became more continuous on parts of the upper reef (e.g., Image 1).

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Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 18% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 197 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

No widespread bleaching — a few individually pale colonies, occasional grazing scars. The thin wire corals reaching out from the wall are white along their whole length, consistent with bleached wire coral (e.g., Image 47); another runs along an overhang (e.g., Image 55).

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No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.

Fish and other fauna

A blue Linckia laevigata and red sea whips were also seen. Anthias, chromis, black-and-yellow bannerfish, butterflyfishes, and cloud-like schools of silversides and fusiliers hang off the drop-off (e.g., Image 4, Image 21).

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Comparisons with other data

Wabang (2018) surveyed this site (spelled Humapura) in 2018. Within 5 km, two independent stations (WCS Indonesia via MERMAID and WWF-US / WWF-Indonesia) recorded station-year means of 0.0–53% hard coral cover between 2014 and 2025; the nearest, WCS Indonesia via MERMAID at station 1001, 0.52 km away, read 0.0% in 2025.

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.