Egypt Red Sea - Gazella Reef (Wadi Lahami)
Part of the regional summaries: Egypt and Red Sea
More info
Egypt (NOAA CRW virtual station)Gazella Reef is a well-built ridge-and-slope system of corymbose, staghorn, and cauliflower corals in pink and lavender, with a lionfish sheltering in the shadows, and one frame sets a cream-white branching colony recorded as dead beside a living pink-lavender one. Published cover was 17% with 54% of coral tissue bleached.
شعاب الغزالة نظام متقن البناء من حواف ومنحدرات يضم مرجانيات عنقودية وقرون الأيل ومرجانيات على شكل القرنبيط بالوردي والخزامي، مع سمكة أسد تحتمي في الظلال، وفي إحدى الصور تظهر مستعمرة متفرعة بيضاء كريمية سُجّلت ميتة بجوار مستعمرة حية وردية خزامية. وبلغت التغطية المنشورة 17% مع ابيضاض 54% من نسيج المرجان.
ترجمة هذا الملخص بالذكاء الاصطناعي؛ النص الإنجليزي هو المعتمد.
Two independent survey stations shown with the program’s logo — click one to see how far it is from this site.
Four other CRD dive sites with their own pages within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.
5 of the 21 photographs on this page are shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.
Site description
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).
General benthic features
The reef is well built — 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).
Coral cover
- Reference: Mayfield (2025)
- Data file: (Mayfield, 2025-appendix A)
- CoralNet submission package (accession #5546)
- 17% ± 12% SD across 214 photographs.
Stressors
The site record reports 54% of coral tissue bleached at about 25.8°C-weeks DHW on the survey date (22 September 2024; NOAA Coral Reef Watch, Egypt virtual station), still more than half the tissue on the reef. One frame is a deliberate side-by-side of dead and living coral: Anderson's finger points at a cream-white branching colony with long, thick branches recorded as dead, beside a living pink-lavender colony with shorter, finer branches on the same patch of rock. Two colonies, one frame, one comparison. In places, red, curly cyanobacterial mats are overgrowing coral bommies, with red patches on the surrounding sand (e.g., Image 21).
Comparisons with other data
Apart from our own published survey shown here, we found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, two Reef Check stations recorded station-year means of 30–56% hard coral cover between 2009 and 2023; the nearest, Reef Check at Wadi Lahami House Reef 1, 3.20 km away, read 30–46% between 2009 and 2023.
Dive record
The second dive of 22 September 2024 with Red Sea Diving Safari, on the reef complex south of Shabrour.
CV model comparison
More info
The reference is this dive site's own published CoralNet point count by the author (Mayfield 2025, Environments 12:248, Appendix A; most frames annotated by CoralNet's AI, trained and checked by the author). The computer-vision rows are this site's own values: Claude is a blind point count of all of the site's edited photographs, DINOv3 ran on the site's benchmark frames (the photographs the author annotated point by point), and CoralSCOP is the site's finished survey of its edited photographs. They are on different frame sets from the published count, a row under 30 frames is indicative only, and no computer-vision method yet estimates coral cover accurately on new images.| Method | Hard coral cover (%) | Photos (n) ± SE |
|---|---|---|
| Published point count (CoralNet-assisted) | 16.5 | |
| In-house DINOv3 | 46.4 | n = 30 |
| CoralSCOP unedited | 22.1 | n = 222 |
| CoralSCOP edited | 22.3 | n = 208 |
| Claude (edited photos) | 17.8 | n = 204 · SE 0.9 |
The four computer-vision methods disagree by 28.6 pp (17.8–46.4%) and read 1.3–29.9 pp above the published point count (16.5%); the headline is the published point count because it is the site's published value (CoralNet-assisted: most frames were annotated by CoralNet's AI, trained and checked by the author).
See a more detailed, stand-alone version of this table.
Independent surveys nearby
Coral Reef DiagnosticsWithin 5 km, 2 independent survey stations recorded hard coral cover in 16 surveys between 2009 and 2023. Of the 2 stations surveyed in more than one year, 1 declined (by 12 points) and 1 increased (by 11 points) between their first and latest surveys. Two stations share the longest span (2009–2023); one, Wadi Lahami House Reef 1 (Reef Check, 3.20 km away), went from 30% in 2009 (mean of 2 surveys) to 41% in 2023 (mean of 2 surveys). Since 2021, station-year means average 43% (range 41–44%; n = 2 station-years from 4 surveys). This site's own estimate (17%) is not compared with these surveys: none lies within 2 km.
Collected by other programs using different methods (Reef Check uses point-intercept transects), so these are context for the figures above, not a like-for-like comparison. Where a station was surveyed more than once, the cell shows either the range of its values or, as a single value, the mean of surveys made in one year. Station names are not dive-site names.
| Agency | Site / location | Date | Hard coral cover (%) | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reef Check | Wadi Lahami House Reef 1 | 2009–2023 | 30–46% (range of yearly means; 8 surveys) | 3.20 km |
| Reef Check | Wadi Lahami House Reef 2 | 2009–2023 | 44–56% (range of yearly means; 8 surveys) | 3.23 km |
Data & links
All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics. Data are from Coral Reef Diagnostics and the organizations named in the data sources above.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.