Atauro - Haruine night dive

General benthic features

The night frames document the interstitial reef: a coralline-crusted rubble pavement with several teal colonial tunicates, small blue-gray coral heads, a brown plating coral, and a cream lobed leather soft coral; a coarse rubble-and-shell-hash floor with vivid red encrusting sponges and a shrimp; and one macro of a leather soft coral with its golden, white-tipped polyps fully expanded in night feeding posture (e.g., Image 1, Image 2, Image 3, Image 4).

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Coral cover

• Coral cover: not reported. This was a night dive, and its strobe-lit frames of rubble pavement, small coral heads, and feeding polyps would measure the lit subject and the framing rather than reef cover; the daytime cover is on the Atauro - Haruine pin.

Stressors

On the night dive, one ridged foliose colony shows possible bleaching across about half its surface (one frame, Image 5): cream-white tissue with its ridges intact grades into brown pigmented tissue.

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The pale rim on a neighboring foliose colony is a normal growth edge. In the gallery, one strobe-blown white patch in a night frame is camera overexposure, not bleached tissue (e.g., Image 1). No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.

Comparisons with other data

Reef Check surveyed this site (Haru ina) in 2017, 0.00 km from the pin. Within 5 km, twelve independent stations recorded station-year means of 13–65% hard coral cover between 2004 and 2017; the nearest, Reef Check at Haru ina, 0.00 km away, read 53% in 2017.

Dive record

The night dive was logged on 31 January 2024, in at 19:18 for 53 minutes, 19.5 m maximum and 9.5 m average depth, average water temperature 27.9°C (dive-computer minimum 26.7°C); the log row carries no site name.

Other notes

The daytime dive at the same site (30 January 2024) is on the Atauro - Haruine pin; a night dive and its daytime counterpart are kept on separate pins.