Atauro - Raiketa

Setting

Across all four: visibility is moderate with visible particulate load, the reef is structurally complex and branching-Acropora-dominated, 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 — tan staghorn Acropora thickets and one small tabulate Acropora 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 Acropora 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 (Montipora-like) surrounded by silver-gray, olive-green, and salmon-pink branching and corymbose Acropora, 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 Acropora, with a pale plating Acropora 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

Coral cover

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

On stress — white branch tips are pervasive but are normal Acropora growth-tip pigmentation, not bleaching; a small number of pale-to-white colonies sit in the background of frames two and four, and from photographs alone these cannot be separated into bleaching, recent mortality, or simply pale pigment. No disease lesions, predation scars, gear, tape, or man-made objects appear in any frame.

Comparisons with other data

Also on record for this site: Small planktivorous reef fishes, including anthias- and damselfish-like schools, are conspicuous above the reef. 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. A pale-to-white branching-coral signal recurs across roughly a third of the reviewed sequence — several independent frames, not one isolated shot — so this is better described as a recurring paling pattern than a site with no bleaching signal; whether it reflects genuine thermal stress, natural branch-tip whitening, or a mix of the two cannot be determined from the photographs alone.

Dive record

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