Chagos Archipelago - Danger Island (BIDI11)

Setting

BIDI11 is an intermediate-exposure submerged forereef outside the lagoon at Danger Island (station CTD cast to 23 m), surveyed 12 March 2015 by the Living Oceans Foundation team.

General benthic features

It recorded 4 genera: Porites at 30% of the benthos and 75% of all live coral, then Platygyra 6.0%, Favites 2.0%, and Stylophora 2.0%. The monodominance is probably real; the absence of everything else is not established, because the entire survey is one 100-point transect in one depth stratum.

Coral cover

• Reference: Mayfield & Dempsey (2026)
• CoralNet submission package
• One formal transect recorded 40% coral against 21% algae, with pavement at 51% and non-coral invertebrates at 30%, not resolved to taxon.
• There is no depth profile, no range, and no standard deviation — the headline 40% is literally 40 points out of 100, and the four-genus result is four genera that happened to fall under them.
• That single transect is its only cover number, and the published station value is the same 40% (Mayfield & Dempsey 2026, Oceans, supplemental S1).
• Live hard coral measured on the in situ benthic transects of the LOF BIOT-1 expedition (Mayfield & Dempsey 2026, Oceans, supplemental S1), against total algal cover (all algal groups) of 21% of the benthos.
• The transect figure is this site's authoritative cover value; no image-derived product overrides it.

Stressors

Condition cannot be assessed: Anderson did not dive here, no photographs exist, there are no CoralNet or Coralscapes products, and no bleaching figure was published for this site. The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 1.0% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral; they carry no bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns field.

Comparisons with other data

Apart from the Living Oceans Foundation survey shown here, we found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. If you would like to share yours, please email us.