Egypt Red Sea - Habili Daisy (Wadi Lahami)
Part of the regional summaries: Egypt and Red Sea
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Egypt (NOAA CRW virtual station)A submerged pinnacle at Wadi Lahami rising to a shallow crown densely built with branching and plating corals over red coralline rock, with dense clouds of chromis and anthias against deep blue. The reef was well covered and heavily bleached at once, with about 61% of coral tissue affected in September 2024.
قمة مغمورة في وادي لحمي ترتفع إلى تاج ضحل مبني بكثافة من مرجانيات متفرعة وصفائحية فوق صخر مرجاني أحمر، مع سحب كثيفة من أسماك الكروميس والأنثياس على خلفية زرقاء عميقة. كانت الشعاب مكسوة جيدًا ومبيضّة بشدة في آن واحد، إذ تأثر نحو 61% من نسيج المرجان في سبتمبر 2024.
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 8 photographs on this page are shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.
Site description
General benthic features
The pinnacle rises steeply into a shallow crown, its flanks and crest densely built — corymbose and staghorn Acropora, cauliflower pocilloporids, encrusting and foliose plates, faviids, and small massives packed together over rock heavily encrusted with red and maroon coralline algae and sponge (e.g., Image 1).
Coral cover
- Reference: Mayfield (2025)
- Data file: (Mayfield, 2025-appendix A)
- CoralNet submission package (accession #5546)
- 23% ± 13% SD across 52 photographs.
- The published value rests on 52 of this dive's photographs.
Stressors
The site record reports 61% 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). The reef is well covered and heavily bleached at the same time. Wide-angles of the crest show white and pale-cream colonies distributed throughout a structurally intact framework, sitting against red coralline and maroon encrusting growth that hold saturated color in the same frames (e.g., Image 3, Image 4).
Among the bleached and pigmented branching colonies, patches of dead rock carry red cyanobacterial overgrowth (e.g., Image 5).
Fish and other fauna
Chromis and anthias hang off the pinnacle in dense clouds against deep blue (e.g., Image 2).
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, 2.81 km away, read 30–46% between 2009 and 2023.
Dive record
A late-afternoon dive on 22 September 2024 with Red Sea Diving Safari on another Wadi Lahami habili — a submerged pinnacle rising from deeper water.
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, 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) | 22.6 | |
| CoralSCOP unedited | 23.7 | n = 58 |
| CoralSCOP edited | too few photos (n=8) | |
| Claude (edited photos) | 18.0 | n = 50 · SE 1.8 |
The two computer-vision methods agree within 5.7 pp (18.0–23.7%) and read within 4.6 pp of the published point count (22.6%).
CoralSCOP edited: this method was run on 8 of 58 photos, under the 10 needed for a value, so it is not shown and is left out of any mean; every other row rests on its own photo count.
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, 2.81 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 (23%) 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) | 2.81 km |
| Reef Check | Wadi Lahami House Reef 2 | 2009–2023 | 44–56% (range of yearly means; 8 surveys) | 2.83 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.