Alor - Umapura

Setting

The set opens topside - boat, black volcanic shoreline, village, shallow reef flat - then drops onto a near-vertical wall on the west side of Ternate Island, in the tidal flow of the Pantar Strait. 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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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 compatible with Pachyseris, Montipora, Echinopora, and Turbinaria, with small hemispherical merulinids of Platygyra/Dipsastraea form and meandering Lobophyllia/Symphyllia 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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Two thirds through, the profile shallows onto a different habitat: tabulate Acropora tables a meter and more across, dense corymbose and staghorn Acropora, Pocillopora, encrusting and foliose Montipora, massive Porites, a close-up domed Dipsastraea with corallites intact, and open fields of Sarcophyton, Lobophytum, Sinularia, and pink Dendronephthya-type 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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Coral cover

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 - and the only man-made object besides dive gear is a thin white monofilament line draped over the reef in several frames. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores evident.

Fish and other fauna

One frame holds a lionfish (Pterois); others a blue Linckia laevigata, red sea whips, and a large angelfish. 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

Also on record for this site: A high-relief wall and slope with numerous ledges and overhangs (e.g., Image 29, Image 43).

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Live cover was moderate to locally high and became more continuous on parts of the upper reef; the large pelagics reported from the site were not dominant in this image set (e.g., Image 1).

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Other notes

Also on record for this site: A high-relief wall and slope with numerous ledges and overhangs (e.g., Image 29, Image 43).