Atauro - Cabbage Patch

Setting

Water is bright blue and visibility excellent; a surgeonfish and several chromis pass above.

General benthic features

The first of the four photographs reviewed in detail is a single colossal foliose colony filling three-quarters of the frame — a dome of tightly folded, whorled, beaded plates in dark brown and tan, the classic "cabbage" growth form — with a black feather star on its flank, a small pale soft coral at the base, and beyond it a pale sand slope carrying scattered gray-brown massive lobate coral heads and one broken branch of a branching coral lying on the sand (e.g., Image 1).

1

In the strongest wide-angle views, a single mound occupies most of the frame and supports small reef fishes above and around its rim. The photographs support the descriptive name without requiring a species-level identification of the dominant foliose coral. The second frame is a mixed shallow garden on rubble and sand: pale pink corymbose colonies, cream lobed leather soft corals, a gray-brown maze-patterned brain coral, gray lumpy encrusting masses, tan fine-branching colonies, several large dark blue-black feather stars perched high on the framework, a vivid blue-and-yellow damselfish, and a smaller blue damsel, with open sand between the coral clumps (e.g., Image 2).

2

The fourth frame is a close view of a dome of pale cream, tightly curled fleshy polyps (a euphylliid, bubble- or anchor-coral type) pressed against a tan branching coral with its polyps fully extended, a brown mushroom coral (fungiid) at the lower edge (e.g., Image 4).

4

Growth-form variety across the four frames reviewed in detail is high — foliose, massive, corymbose, branching, fleshy euphylliid, and soft coral — but so is open sand and rubble; this is a heterogeneous garden, not a continuous carpet.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 37% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 115 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

The third frame is the most informative on condition: a large massive coral dome, fine-corallite and tan, with pale abraded patches on its upper surface and a strip of exposed white skeleton around part of its base — recent basal tissue loss, not bleaching of the whole colony — attended by a small blue-and-white cleaner-wrasse-type fish, and flanked by a big pink-mauve lobed leather soft coral with polyps expanded, mauve corymbose colonies, an orange sponge, and pale gray lobed soft corals on sediment-dusted rubble behind (e.g., Image 3).

3

A small branching colony was stark white over most of its branches, with its polyps still visible and only its base pigmented, beside pigmented brown massive colonies: a bleached colony (e.g., Image 21).

21

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

Comparisons with other data

The XL Catlin Seaview Survey covered a nearby station (transect 30015) in 2014, 0.21 km from the pin; we could not confirm that it is the same reef. Within 5 km, eleven independent stations recorded station-year means of 17–65% hard coral cover between 2004 and 2017; the nearest, XL Catlin Seaview Survey at transect 30015, 0.21 km away, read 21% in 2014.

Dive record

Cabbage Patch was dived on 31 January 2024, a shallow profile to 14.6 m maximum and 7.6 m average, and the frames justify the name.

Other notes

Anderson's dive log records this dive (31 January 2024, in at 10:23) under the name "La Dania's Leap"; the page uses the name of the photo folder, Cabbage Patch.