Egypt Red Sea - Gazella Reef (Wadi Lahami)

Setting

The reef is a ridge-and-slope system: a coral-covered ridge running along the drop, canyon-like gaps between coral massifs, and a face descending into deep blue with sand at its foot (e.g., Image 3, Image 4).

34

General benthic features

It is more built than Shabrour-north — corymbose and staghorn Acropora, cauliflower pocilloporids in pink, rose, and lavender, encrusting, and foliose plates, faviids, and small massives packed along the ridge, with anthias and chromis pouring over it and a lionfish in the shadows (e.g., Image 1, Image 2).

12

Coral cover

Coral cover is 16.5% ± 12.2 across 214 photographs, quoted verbatim from Mayfield, A.B. (2025) Environments 12:248 — Red Sea 2023-24 bleaching; CoralNet point annotation, Appendix A — a manual, diver-annotated CoralNet point count from Anderson's own published work, not a computer vision output and not recomputed here.

Stressors

The site record reports 53.8% of coral tissue bleached at about 21.9°C-weeks DHW, the lowest bleaching figure of the four Wadi Lahami sites here but still more than half the tissue on the reef. The frame Anderson captioned "dead vs. alive" is a deliberate side-by-side: his own finger points at a bleached cream-white Pocillopora sitting directly beside a fully pigmented pink-lavender Pocillopora of the same growth form, on the same patch of rock. Two colonies, one frame, one comparison.

Comparisons with other data

No independent survey was made at this exact site; the nearest ones are listed in the table below.

Dive record

The second dive of 22 September 2024 with Red Sea Diving Safari, on the reef complex south of Shabrour.

Other notes

See flags.