Artificial Reef (Bahrain)
Part of the regional summary: Bahrain
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Bahrain (NOAA CRW virtual station)This artificial reef off Bahrain's northeast coast is a set of concrete domes on sand, so thickly felted in reddish-brown algal turf in the murky water that the structures underneath are hidden. A grouper and a few small coral colonies use the domes, with a sand dollar on the surrounding bottom.
هذه الشعاب الاصطناعية قبالة الساحل الشمالي الشرقي للبحرين مجموعة من القباب الخرسانية على الرمل، يغطيها في المياه العكرة بساط كثيف من الطحالب العشبية البنية المحمرة حتى تختفي الهياكل تحتها. وتستخدم القباب سمكة هامور وبضع مستعمرات مرجانية صغيرة، مع دولار رملي على القاع المحيط.
ترجمة هذا الملخص بالذكاء الاصطناعي؛ النص الإنجليزي هو المعتمد.
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Note: NOAA's regional station series averages 1.1°C warmer than the satellite pixel nearest this site (1.6 km away), which is used here instead.One other CRD dive site with its own page within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.
12 of the 19 photographs on this page are shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.
Site description
Setting
This artificial reef site off Bahrain's northeast coast was dived on 23 September 2023, the second dive of the day, near Dilmunia Rock. The photographs were taken at around 8 m in water so turbid that the dive itself is the main thing they document.
General benthic features
The deployed structures are rounded dome-shaped units with knobby protrusions on top, sitting on sand and so completely sheathed in dense reddish-brown filamentous turf that the concrete beneath is invisible and any openings in it unreadable (e.g., Image 8, Image 11, Image 13).
One dome looms out of green haze with a dark undercut at its base and a few small elongate fish holding station beside it; another fills the frame at close range, its whole surface a felted algal mat with one small fish at the margin (e.g., Image 2, Image 5).
A rare coral record in the set is a low mound of maroon and gray filamentous turf rising off pale shelly sand, with a single small cream-tan knobby colony with visible corallites clinging to its edge and already half-overgrown, one dark bivalve shell cemented in beside it (e.g., Image 3).
A few other small colonies grow on the turf-covered rubble, among them a cluster of small knobby colonies (e.g., Image 20) and a black-and-white encrusting coral colony (e.g., Image 21).
Turf and sediment, not coral, are what these structures carry (e.g., Image 14, Image 16).
Coral cover
- Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
- Coral cover: 0.9% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 16 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.
Stressors
No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.
Fish and other fauna
A sand dollar's five-petalled test lies on coarse shell hash and dark red algae (e.g., Image 4).
A grouper rests on the turf beside a dome (e.g., Image 19).
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.
Other notes
For context: Arabian Gulf reefs are naturally low in coral diversity and live through summer water in the mid-30s°C, so a species-poor assemblage here is the regional baseline, not by itself evidence of decline.
CV model comparison
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A few colony-focused photos raise the mean; the median is the typical photo. The CoralSCOP segmentation model reads 40.2% on these photos (see the comparison table), most likely counting algal turf on the concrete structures as live coral. 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
CoralSCOP was run on the same photos and is 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 |
|---|---|---|
| CoralSCOP edited | 40.2* | n = 16 · SE 8.1 |
| Claude (edited photos) | 0.9* | n = 16 · SE 0.9 |
CoralSCOP (edited photos) reads 40.2%, 39.3 pp above Claude's blind point count (0.9%); the headline stays Claude's blind point count because no transect or manual count exists here.
*Based on only 16 reef-habitat photos; this estimate is less certain.
See a more detailed, stand-alone version of this table.
Data & links
All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics. Data are from Coral Reef Diagnostics.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.