Atauro - Watuwai

Setting

That frame is a wide view across a reef crest or upper slope in blue ambient light, with a heavy plankton load visible in the water column.

General benthic features

Living coral is close to continuous across the foreground and mid-ground: an interlocking carpet of tan digitate and corymbose Acropora thickets with pale branch tips, into which small rounded massive Porites-like heads are set — one prominent head mid-frame and a short chain of them to the right. The immediate foreground adds fleshy polyp-covered mounds, a dark crenulated mushroom coral (fungiid), pink crustose coralline crusts, and a low branching soft coral. No sand plain, transect tape, mooring, or other man-made object is in view.

Coral cover

No coral-cover value is published for this site yet, and a computer vision pass is still pending; nothing here is estimated from the photograph.

Stressors

A few broken white branches at lower right are the only clear physical damage; no bleaching pattern is apparent in this frame beyond normal Acropora tip whitening. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores evident.

Fish and other fauna

Small planktivorous damselfishes and anthias hang above the thicket and one blue-bodied, yellow-tailed wrasse crosses the open blue.

Comparisons with other data

At 90 m the two positions effectively coincide, so it is very likely the same reef — but it remains another organization's survey on a different date, not a measurement of this dive. Also on record for this site: No characteristics from another Ataúro site have been transferred to this entry.

Dive record

Watuwai was dived once, on 29 January 2024 (lifetime dive 250): 50 minutes, 32.6 m maximum and 15.2 m average depth, minimum water temperature 26.7°C.

Other notes

The camera failed early in the dive, so exactly one photograph survives and this account is built from it alone. A single frame cannot support a site-wide habitat or cover characterization — it documents the photographed spot and nothing more.