Atauro - Haruine

General benthic features

The daylight frames show two distinct faces of the site. One is a steep reef shoulder falling into deep blue, and it is dominated not by branching coral but by foliose and plating growth: overlapping gray-tan scrolling plates, a pink-mauve encrusting colony, dark massive lobed heads, a large gray lobed leather soft coral on the right edge, an orange sponge, red encrusting sponges, a yellow-armed feather star perched on a mound, and appreciable maroon and green algal turf between colonies (e.g., Image 1).

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The other three are the coral-dense face: broad slopes carpeted edge-to-edge in tan staghorn and corymbose Acropora, with a pale scrolling foliose colony and cream soft corals in the foreground, a tan lobed leather soft coral on the skyline, and thousands of small dark-blue damselfishes hovering over the thickets and out into the water column — in the daylight frames, the fish density is what catches the eye first (e.g., Image 2, Image 3, Image 4).

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Large sections of the gallery show coral-dense framework with relatively little open sand, although lower-cover ledges and shaded crevices interrupt the gardens. Coral form and color vary strongly over short distances, giving the photographed reef a layered appearance.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 41% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 183 of Anderson's edited photographs from the 30 January 2024 daylight dive (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.

Stressors

Anderson's photographs from the daylight dive (not shown) record bleaching: a free-living mushroom coral with a stark-white sector, and a table colony with a broad stark-white band across its middle between pigmented parts, its branchlets intact. Anderson's frames (not shown) show one large plating colony, recorded as a dying acroporid, whose center is cream to stark white, with bare or nearly bare branches, grading to pigmented brown-mauve edges; two other plating colonies carry sharply bounded white patches and bare margins. Another frame, in which Anderson recorded tissue loss, shows a small massive colony whose upper surface is stark-white exposed skeleton above brown living sides. These are recent tissue loss or partial mortality exposing white skeleton, cause unclear. A computer-vision point count called 1.3% of coral points bleached (9 of 183 photos). No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.

Fish and other fauna

Butterflyfish, anthias, and small wrasses appear at the margins; red crustose coralline crusts the flanks. The fauna visible in the selections includes small reef fishes and a distinctive black dorid nudibranch with pale, lavender-tinged tubercles (e.g., Image 21).

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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 logged daylight dive at Haruine, on 30 January 2024, was 66 minutes to 20.4 m maximum and 11.0 m average, average water temperature 28.0°C (dive-computer minimum 27.2°C).