Anguilla - Catheley H
Part of the regional summary: Anguilla
More about this place: Anguilla on Wikipedia
More info
Leeward Caribbean Islands (NOAA CRW virtual station)Catheley H is a small wreck, the MV Catheley H, lying among derelict fish traps and, on the sand, stacks of concrete discs that Anderson logged as coral settlement structures, each capped by a coral (mostly brain corals), with lionfish on the structure and a large stingray gliding past the hull. As on any wreck, its coral cover counts coral growing on the man-made structure, so it isn't comparable with natural-reef cover.
Three independent survey stations shown with the program’s logo — click one to see how far it is from this site.
One other CRD dive site with its own page within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.
These are unedited originals; edited versions will replace them.
15 of the 49 photographs on this page are shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.
Site description
Setting
Catheley H is the wreck of the MV Catheley H: its hull, deck, engine, and mast (e.g., Image 6, Image 39, Image 40, Image 45, Image 41) lie on a sand-and-rubble seafloor threaded with derelict fish traps and stacks of concrete discs, and the whole patchwork has slowly become its own small reef (e.g., Image 3, Image 15, Image 48).
Concrete, wire, and coral rubble on the seafloor have all been colonized (e.g., Image 11, Image 38, Image 39).
Anderson logged Catheley H as the smallest of the three local shipwrecks, with less life than the Oosterdiep, coral settlement structures out in the sand, and an abundance of fairly large brain corals that survived stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD).
General benthic features
Chunky brain corals and boulder corals, likely Montastraea, Orbicella, and Pseudodiploria, crowd both the rock and the human-made structure, while a lionfish lurks at the base of the wreck's structure and a large stingray glides past the hull early in the dive (e.g., Image 10, Image 28, Image 36, Image 46, Image 52).
Coral cover
- Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
- Coral cover: 6.2% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 108 of Anderson's unedited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.
Fish and other fauna
Lionfish shelter on the wreck, one of them inside a derelict wire fish trap, and an arrow crab picks its way through a rocky crevice.
Comparisons with other data
We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, three XL Catlin Seaview Survey stations recorded station-year means of 1.3–2.8% hard coral cover in 2013; the nearest, XL Catlin Seaview Survey at transect 25024, 2.79 km away, read 2.7% in 2013.
CV model comparison
More info
A few colony-focused photos raise the mean; the median is the typical photo. No computer-vision method yet estimates coral cover accurately on new images, so treat this as indicative rather than a measurement; it is revised as the methods improve.More info
DINOv3 and CoralSCOP were run on the same photos and are listed for comparison. No diver transect exists for this trip, so agreement between the rows is not accuracy, and no computer-vision method yet estimates coral cover accurately on new images; treat every row as indicative.| Method | Hard coral cover (%) | Photos (n) ± SE |
|---|---|---|
| In-house DINOv3 | 14.7 | n = 108 · SE 0.8 |
| CoralSCOP unedited | 16.4 | n = 108 · SE 1.3 |
| Claude | 6.2 | n = 108 · SE 0.9 |
The two computer-vision methods agree within 1.7 pp (14.7–16.4%) and read 8.5–10.2 pp above Claude's blind point count (6.2%); the headline is Claude's blind point count because no transect or manual count exists here.
See a more detailed, stand-alone version of this table.
Independent surveys nearby
Within 5 km, 3 independent survey stations recorded hard coral cover in 2013. The most recent nearby survey is from 2013, so these values predate recent heat stress. This site's own estimate (6.2%) is not compared with these surveys: none lies within 2 km.
Collected by other programs using different methods (the XL Catlin Seaview Survey uses photo-transects with automated image annotation), so these are context for the figures above, not a like-for-like comparison. Where a station was surveyed more than once, the cell shows either the range of its values or, as a single value, the mean of surveys made in one year. Station names are not dive-site names.
| Agency | Site / location | Date | Hard coral cover (%) | Distance | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| XL Catlin Seaview Survey | transect 25024 | 2013 | 2.7% | 2.79 km | doi:10.14264/uql.2019.930 |
| XL Catlin Seaview Survey | transect 25018 | 2013 | 2.8% | 4.66 km | doi:10.14264/uql.2019.930 |
| XL Catlin Seaview Survey | transect 25019 | 2013 | 1.3% | 4.87 km | doi:10.14264/uql.2019.930 |
Data & links
All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics. Data are from Coral Reef Diagnostics and the organizations named in the data sources above.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.