Egypt Red Sea - Shabrour-north (Wadi Lahami)
Part of the regional summaries: Egypt and Red Sea
More info
Egypt (NOAA CRW virtual station) · Northern and Central Red Sea ecoregion mean=12.2°C-heating weeksShabrour-north, in Egypt's Wadi Lahami, recorded the highest bleaching figure of any site in this entire Red Sea set - 73.8% of coral tissue - and produced the single most instructive image in the whole survey: one corymbose Acropora colony with its outer branches stark white and its interior still fully pigmented, one colony captured mid-bleaching. Published cover was 24%, roughly half what a nearby Reef Check station recorded in 2009 (49.0%), though that comparison spans 15 years and a different station.
سجّل شبرور الشمالي، في وادي لحمي بمصر، أعلى نسبة ابيضاض بين مواقع مجموعة البحر الأحمر بأكملها — 73.8% من الأنسجة المرجانية — وأنتج أكثر صور المسح دلالةً على الإطلاق: مستعمرة Acropora عنقودية مسطحة واحدة بأفرعها الخارجية شديدة البياض وداخلها محتفظ بكامل صبغته، مستعمرة واحدة التُقطت في منتصف ابيضاضها.
ترجمة هذا الملخص بالذكاء الاصطناعي؛ النص الإنجليزي هو المعتمد. Translated from the site’s shorter map summary.
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 within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.
Site description
General benthic features
The reef is a broad sand plain studded with coral bommies and low patch reefs, giving onto a more built-up slope (e.g., Image 4).
Bommies carry mixed Acropora, pocilloporids, Millepora-type fire coral, faviids, and small massives; the sand between them is wide and open (e.g., Image 1, Image 2, Image 3).
Coral cover
Coral cover is 24.1% ± 14.1 across 100 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 73.8% of coral tissue bleached at about 21.9°C-weeks DHW — the highest bleaching figure of any site in this entire Red Sea set. The condition record here is the clearest teaching material in the whole set. One frame Anderson captioned "healthy and bleached" shows a single corymbose Acropora whose outer branches are stark white while its interior stays olive-brown — one colony, one moment, both states. Another, "stingray and dying corals", puts a part-buried stingray beside a bommie carrying a white Acropora, a bleached yellow-green fire coral, and pale pocilloporids.
Fish and other fauna
A gray shark cruises over a bommie field in which most colonies read white.
Comparisons with other data
The site record also carries an external cross-reference: Reef Check's Wadi Lahami House Reef 2 station, 1.85 km away, reports a mean of 49.0% hard coral over four surveys (2009–2023), reported side by side with the CRD figure and deliberately not averaged.
Dive record
The first dive of the Wadi Lahami leg, at dawn on 22 September 2024 with Red Sea Diving Safari.
Other notes
See flags.
CV model comparison
More info
The reference row is this dive site's own published value (Mayfield 2025, Appendix A, 100 photos); the other rows are AREA-level (Wadi Lahami) comparisons, not run on this site's frames. ⚠ The comparison rows are REGIONS, not dive sites: the paper's main tables report cover by region, and this site's own value comes from its Appendix A. ⚠ The manual column and the CV columns are on DIFFERENT FRAME SETS: the published cover spans 674–1,180 frames, the CV arms ran on the 30- and 129-frame hand-scored reference subsets. CoralNet is n/a by design: the reference set IS the hand-scored set. DINOv3 is restricted to frames it never saw. CoralNet automated point classifier: n/a — the reference set IS the hand-scored set; these frames carry no independent CoralNet robot label to compare against CoralSCOP (SAM-based mask-sum), unedited photos: pending — CoralSCOP run: 370/747 images scored at build time CoralSCOP (SAM-based mask-sum), edited photos: pending — CoralSCOP run: 370/747 images scored at build time| Method | Hard-coral cover (%) |
|---|---|
| Manual (published) | 24.1 |
| In-house DINOv3 | 40.6 |
| Claude | 28.0 |
Independent surveys nearby
Dr. Coral (CRD)Within 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 and 1 increased between their first and latest surveys. The longest record, Wadi Lahami House Reef 2 (Reef Check, 1.85 km away), went from 56% in 2009 to 44% in 2023. Surveys since 2021 average 43% (range 41–44%, n=2). This site's own estimate (24%) sits 17.1 points below the recent range (41–44%); the methods differ, so the comparison is context, not a like-for-like test.
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 range is shown. Station names are not dive-site names.
| Agency | Site / location | Date | Hard coral cover (%) | Distance | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reef Check | Wadi Lahami House Reef 2 | 2009–2023 | 44–56% (8 surveys) | 1.85 km | — |
| Reef Check | Wadi Lahami House Reef 1 | 2009–2023 | 30–46% (8 surveys) | 2.03 km | — |
Data & links
All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics. Data are from Coral Reef Diagnostics and the organizations named in the data-sources table above.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.