Atauro - Raiketa

Setting

Across the photographs: visibility is moderate with visible particulate load, the reef is structurally complex and dominated by branching corals, and living cover in the photographed patches is locally very high with little open sand or rubble.

General benthic features

Frame by frame: the first is a steep portrait view up a coral ridge into blue water, and it is the most mixed of the four reviewed in detail — tan staghorn coral thickets and one small tabulate coral plate, a pale ridged meandroid brain coral, a large dark massive head in shadow at upper right, beige folded foliose plates, yellow-brown digitate growth, brown feather stars (crinoids) perched mid-frame, brown xeniid soft-coral polyps, red and maroon crustose coralline crusts, and short green algal tufts along the lower right (e.g., Image 1).

1

The second frame is a near edge-to-edge staghorn coral thicket running down a slope into blue, with two feather stars sitting on the branches — one black, one white-banded — gray damselfishes tucked among the branches, and green filamentous algae in the gaps (e.g., Image 2).

2

The third is the closest view: a large lavender-gray plating colony with folded margins surrounded by silver-gray, olive-green, and salmon-pink branching and corymbose corals, a maroon coralline patch, and a dark corymbose colony — essentially no bare substrate in the frame (e.g., Image 3).

3

The fourth is again wall-to-wall staghorn corals, with a pale plating coral and further branching thickets receding up-slope, yellow-green lobate and columnar colonies along the left edge, and small damselfishes throughout (e.g., Image 4).

4

Color from encrusting sponges and coralline growth is real but confined to a minority of frames; most of the sequence reads as earth-toned rather than brightly colored. The galleries also show rubble, older framework, and lower-cover patches, so the reef is heterogeneous rather than uniformly carpeted. Nevertheless, the photographed route contains repeated expanses of exceptionally dense branching-coral habitat and strong three-dimensional complexity.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 46% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 200 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

Several stark gray-white lobed soft corals on the wall were bleached (e.g., Image 21).

21

Some staghorn thickets looked pale, and a few pale-to-white colonies sit in the background (e.g., Image 2, Image 4); from the photographs alone these cannot be separated into bleaching, recent mortality, or simply pale pigment. No disease lesions or predation scars were seen.

Fish and other fauna

Small planktivorous reef fishes, including anthias- and damselfish-like schools, are conspicuous above the reef.

Comparisons with other data

Reef Check surveyed a station named Rai keta rala, 0.32 km away. Within 5 km, twelve independent stations recorded station-year means of 17–65% hard coral cover between 2004 and 2017; the nearest, Reef Check at Rai keta rala, 0.32 km away, read 39% in 2017.

Dive record

Raiketa was dived on 29 January 2024 to 16.5 m maximum, 8.8 m average.