Egypt Red Sea - Habili Gazella (Wadi Lahami)

General benthic features

The pinnacle rises into a shallow crest carrying a dense, structurally rich framework — corymbose Acropora and cauliflower pocilloporids in cream, gold, pink, and lavender, mustard Millepora-type fire coral, olive faviid domes, tabulate plates, and encrusting growth packed close, with anthias in red and orange streams over it and a pair of trevally patrolling above (e.g., Image 1, Image 2, Image 3).

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Coral cover

Coral cover is 17.7% ± 13.2 across 181 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. The site record's prose gives the visit as 18% cover with 45.9% of coral tissue bleached at about 21.8°C-weeks DHW; the numeric fields carry 17.7% and 45.5%.

Stressors

That is the second-lowest bleaching figure of the Egypt leg, behind Habili Gazella's own near neighbor Gazella Reef, and it is visibly lower in the photographs too.

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 third dive of 23 September 2024 with Red Sea Diving Safari, on the habili — the submerged pinnacle — associated with Gazella Reef (e.g., Image 4).

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Other notes

A coordinate caveat travels with this site, recorded in the site record itself: the source sheet gave Habili Gazella the same coordinates as Gazella Reef, and an offset of roughly 200 m south has been applied so both markers are visible. The position should be corrected if better coordinates emerge. See flags.