Egypt Red Sea - Habili El Ghadeer (Marsa Nakari)

Setting

An offshore habili — a submerged pinnacle that does not break the surface — dived on the morning of 21 September 2024 with Red Sea Diving Safari. The structure is a steep-sided tower rising from deeper water, its flanks dropping away into blue on every side (e.g., Image 1).

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General benthic features

The upper surface is a dark, rugged, heavily bioeroded plateau — largely maroon and purple encrusting coralline algae, turf, and old framework, with coral occupying a minority of the surface. What coral there is sits in tight clusters: cauliflower and knobby pocilloporids, small corymbose Acropora, foliose, and encrusting plates in olive and mustard, and a few large table Acropora cantilevered off the rim into open water (e.g., Image 2, Image 3).

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Coral cover

Coral cover is 13.2% ± 11.6 across 161 photographs, the lowest of the Egyptian sites in this set, 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 57.2% of coral tissue bleached at about 21.9°C-weeks DHW. The single frame Anderson captioned by hand is the site's headline: a very large elongate table Acropora, more than a meter across, bleached uniformly white from its center to every branch tip (e.g., Image 4).

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Fish and other fauna

Red anthias hang in curtains along the flanks, and a well-camouflaged scorpionfish sits motionless on the encrusting rock in one frame.

Comparisons with other data

No prior survey data from this site. If you would like to share yours, please email us.

Other notes

See flags.