Egypt Red Sea - Salah (Wadi Lahami)

General benthic features

The reef is genuinely spectacular and genuinely in trouble at the same time, and the photographs make both halves of that plain (e.g., Image 4).

4

One crest frame is as good as reef photography from this leg gets: warm cream and gold corymbose Acropora in the foreground, a deep maroon-red Acropora thicket behind, a stark white Acropora between them, banded butterflyfish and a bannerfish crossing the top of the frame, all lit from a bright surface. Structurally the site is a well-built slope with a dense Porites-and-Acropora framework, dropping onto sand (e.g., Image 1, Image 3).

13

Coral cover

Coral cover is 28.1% ± 18.3 across 218 photographs — the highest published cover of any Egyptian site in this set, and second only to Alrass Alakhdar across the whole Red Sea 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 62.9% of coral tissue bleached at about 21.8°C-weeks DHW. Another frame is the same reef's other face: two large brilliant-white staghorn Acropora colonies, a bleached knobby massive above them, a bleached lobate coral below, and bleached yellow-green Millepora-type fire coral filling the background (e.g., Image 2).

2

Comparisons with other data

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

Dive record

The first dive of 23 September 2024, the last day of the Egypt leg, with Red Sea Diving Safari.

Other notes

See flags.