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).

1

The other three are the coral-rich 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 — the fish density is the single most striking feature of the day set (e.g., Image 2, Image 3, Image 4).

234

The night frames document the interstitial reef instead: 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 5, Image 6, Image 7, Image 8).

5678

Coral cover

Coral cover: 41% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 183 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 bleaching, disease lesion, predation scar, transect tape, or man-made object appears in any of the eight frames — one strobe-blown white patch in a night frame is camera overexposure, not bleached tissue, and should not be read as one.

Fish and other fauna

Butterflyfish, anthias, and small wrasses appear at the margins; red crustose coralline crusts the flanks.

Comparisons with other data

Also on record for this site: The two accounts are on the separate day and night markers below. Large sections of the gallery show coral-rich framework with relatively little open sand, although lower-cover ledges and shaded crevices interrupt the gardens. The fauna visible in the selections includes small reef fishes and a distinctive black dorid nudibranch with pale, lavender-tinged tubercles. Coral form and color vary strongly over short distances, giving the photographed reef a layered appearance. The images support a high-complexity mixed-coral characterization consistent with the model estimate. These are a real, photographer-flagged pattern at Haruine, not an isolated frame.

Dive record

Haruine was dived by day and again after dark, on 30-31 January 2024 — the logged daylight dive was 66 minutes to 20.4 m maximum and 11.0 m average, minimum water temperature 27.2°C (lifetime dive 253).