Atauro - Inner Reef

General benthic features

The first photograph is a coral garden with essentially no bare substrate: thick blunt-fingered columnar colonies in gray-brown and lavender, a dense brown corymbose Acropora mound, cream and lilac digitate and corymbose colonies, a mauve-purple corymbose colony in the near corner, pale yellow-green massive lobate corals 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 gallery photographs: high living cover, strong fine- and coarse-scale relief, abundant crustose coralline algae, and no disease lesion or predation scar visible. A computer-vision point count called 1.6% of coral points bleached (13 of 193 photos). 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.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• 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.

Stressors

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 (a count that takes pale patches and lesions together; the computer-vision count, which scores bleaching alone, found it in 13 of 193 photos, 6.7%) — more than an isolated occurrence, though still short of a uniform reef-wide signal. The photographs also document a large giant clam embedded among the living coral (e.g., Image 3, Image 4), and a crown-of-thorns seastar was photographed on this dive (e.g., Image 21).

3421

A fouled, algae-encrusted rope lay draped over the top of a large brown massive colony and hung down its face, a derelict line (photo not shown).

Fish and other fauna

A black-and-yellow butterflyfish crosses the frame and small dark damselfishes shelter in the branches (e.g., Image 1). The two close frames among the four reviewed in detail 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 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 corals to one side and pale pink verrucose branching colonies above (e.g., Image 3, Image 4).

Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, twelve independent stations recorded station-year means of 13–65% hard coral cover between 2004 and 2017; the nearest, Coral Triangle Center (CTC) at Beloi (10), 0.77 km away, read 49% in 2017.

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 among the four reviewed in detail show dense cover and many growth forms.