Atauro - Inner Reef

General benthic features

The first is a coral garden with essentially no bare substrate: thick blunt-fingered columnar Porites-type colonies in gray-brown and lavender, a dense brown corymbose Acropora mound, cream and lilac digitate and corymbose colonies, a mauve-purple Pocillopora-like corymbose colony in the near corner, pale yellow-green massive lobate Porites and dark lobate heads behind, and — on the right margin — a cluster of orange-brown tube sponges with red interiors (e.g., Image 1).

1

The second wide frame is a shallower, brighter field of bushy cream and tan branching Acropora running to a blue horizon, with a large brown tube-sponge complex mid-frame, two black feather stars, maroon algal turf and coralline in the interstices, a butterflyfish, an orange-and-dark anemonefish-type damselfish, and dozens of chromis and a surgeonfish silhouetted in the water above (e.g., Image 2).

2

Across the four frames: high living cover, strong fine- and coarse-scale relief, abundant crustose coralline algae, and no bleaching, disease lesion, predation scar, gear, or man-made object visible.

Coral cover

Coral cover: 45% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 193 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.

Fish and other fauna

A black-and-yellow butterflyfish crosses the frame and small dark damselfishes shelter in the branches. The two close frames both feature giant clams (Tridacna sp., fluted shells) wedged into the framework: one with a mottled cream-and-black mantle beneath a large maze-patterned Platygyra brain coral, the other with a dark blue-green striated mantle and a gaping siphon, flanked by a large cream-tentacled sea anemone that shelters a small anemonefish, with fine-corallite massive Porites to one side and pale pink verrucose branching colonies above (e.g., Image 3, Image 4).

34

Comparisons with other data

Also on record for this site: Sand, rubble, and pale hardground remain visible in channels between coral outcrops. The repeated wide views show locally high living-coral cover and substantial fine- and coarse-scale structural complexity. The selections do not show a conspicuous site-wide bleaching pattern, but pale-to-white patches and small dead or overgrown lesions recur across roughly a fifth of the reviewed frames — more than an isolated occurrence, though still short of a uniform reef-wide signal. The edited set also documents a large giant clam embedded among the living coral, and a crown-of-thorns seastar is present in one frame — a coral-predation pressure this account otherwise does not mention.

Dive record

Inner Reef was dived on 30 January 2024, a shallow profile to 12.2 m maximum and 6.4 m average.

Other notes

The two wide frames are the richest and most growth-form-diverse images in this whole small-set queue.