Red Dock
More about this place: Necker Island (Virgin Limited Edition)
2026-07-02
Red Dock is the shallow reef off Necker Island's pink jetty, where living elkhorn coral, a threatened Caribbean species, still forms broad golden stands beside the skeletons of colonies lost earlier. Boulder and brain corals, finger-coral thickets, and sea fans fill in, and hand-counted photos put living hard coral at 7.4%. No bleaching or disease was seen.
The white line is this site’s dive track — the white dot marks where it started and the red “End” marker where it ended.
Three other CRD dive sites within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.
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Site description
Anderson's own point count of 35 Red Dock photographs (1,050 points) puts hard coral cover at 7.4% ± 10.6 (median 4.0, range 0–46.7%). Massive heads on pavement (22 frames) are the commonest habitat — Orbicella annularis-complex and Porites astreoides lobes, many largely turfed with live tissue reduced to patches. Living elkhorn (9 frames) is the finding that matters: broad Acropora palmata plates with white growing margins, in thickets and as isolated colonies. Red Dock is the only Necker area with manual ground truth; computer-vision values are listed in the method table for comparison.
CV model comparison
| Method | Hard-coral cover (%) |
|---|---|
| Manual (author's point count) | 7.4 |
| Claude (same 35 photos) | 6.7 |
| In-house DINOv3 | 20.2 |
| CoralSCOP unedited | 20.8 |
| Mean (± SD) | 15.9 ± 8.0 |
| Range | 6.7–20.8 |
Manual = Anderson's own point count of 35 Red Dock photographs; the computer-vision values are for comparison (mean and range exclude the manual value).
All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics. Data are from Coral Reef Diagnostics.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.