Artificial Reef (Bahrain)

Setting

Four usable in-water frames, shot at around 8 m in water so turbid that the dive itself is the main thing they document.

General benthic features

Frames 2 and 5 are the deployed structures: 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).

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In frame 5 one dome looms out of green haze with a dark undercut at its base and a few small elongate fish holding station beside it; in frame 2 the same kind of structure 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).

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Frame 3 is the closest thing in the set to a coral record: a low mound of maroon and gray filamentous turf rising off pale shelly sand, with a single small cream-tan knobby colony — visible corallites, most likely Porites — clinging to its edge and already half-overgrown, one dark bivalve shell cemented in beside it (e.g., Image 3).

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Turf and sediment, not coral, are what these structures carry (e.g., Image 14, Image 16).

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Coral cover

No coral-cover figure is published for this site. Nothing on the map attaches a cover measurement to this site, and no computer vision pass has been run on these frames; a value will be added if transect data, a nearby independent survey, or a CV pass on Anderson's own photographs becomes available. No cover should be inferred from the photographs above.

Stressors

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

Fish and other fauna

Frame 4 is a sand dollar, its five-petalled test lying on coarse shell hash and dark red algae (e.g., Image 4).

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Comparisons with other data

Also on record for this site: Artificial reef site off Bahrain's northeast coast, dived 23 Sep 2023 (second dive of the day, near Dilmunia Rock). A resident grouper, damselfish, and a lone black-and-white encrusting coral colony occupy the structure, with a sand dollar and sea cucumber on the surrounding sandy bottom (e.g., Image 7, Image 12, Image 19, Image 21).

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Gulf ecoregion).

Other notes

For context: Arabian Gulf reefs are naturally low in coral diversity and live through summer water in the mid-30s C — the most thermally tolerant reef corals known — so a species-poor assemblage here is the regional baseline, not by itself evidence of decline.