Egypt Red Sea - Om Halhala (Marsa Nakari)

General benthic features

The reef is a well-built coral slope, dense and structurally complex, dropping from shallow water down onto a white sand plain with scattered outlying bommies (e.g., Image 1).

1

Its dominant element is massive coral: broad fields of lobate and knobby Porites that form the framework, with corymbose and staghorn Acropora, pocilloporids, and encrusting plates layered over and between them (e.g., Image 3).

3

Large columnar bommies rise several meters off the slope (e.g., Image 2).

2

Coral cover

Coral cover is 24.0% ± 15.2 across 216 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 61.2% of coral tissue bleached at about 21.9°C-weeks DHW — the second-highest bleaching figure of the Egypt leg. And a very large proportion of that framework is white (e.g., Image 4).

4

One frame shows a continuous field of lobate Porites, dozens of colonies across, in which effectively every colony is chalk-white, running from the foreground to a bleached bommie in the background — with dark pigmented Acropora thickets holding normal color on the opposite side of the same frame. That contrast within a single image is what makes the call here unambiguous.

Comparisons with other data

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

Dive record

The second dive of 21 September 2024 with Red Sea Diving Safari, and structurally the most substantial of the Marsa Nakari-area sites.

Other notes

See flags.