Chagos Archipelago - Peros Banhos (BIPB69)

Setting

BIPB69 is a protected submerged lagoonal patch reef inside Peros Banhos; the published site-depth cell is blank, so the reef has no depth on record (e.g., Image 1, Image 4).

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General benthic features

Across 25 genera, Acropora holds 70% of all coral and Echinopora is a distant second at 14% (e.g., Image 2, Image 8).

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Coral cover

It is one of the highest-cover reefs in the archipelago: 64.7% living coral against 26.0% algae, 5th of 109 Chagos sites for cover and 98th of 109 for algae, among the ten lowest algal covers recorded (e.g., Image 3).

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The depth profile is the cleanest handover in the dataset: a near-monospecific tabular Acropora stand at the two shallow strata, 74.5% and 78% cover with Acropora at 96% and 86% of their coral, giving way to a deepest stratum at 45% cover where Echinopora takes over outright at 60% of the coral and Acropora falls to 10.00% of the benthos — though that stratum rests on a single transect (e.g., Image 7, Image 9).

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The image cover figures (CoralNet 36.7%, Coralscapes 37.3%) pool April and May frames and so describe neither dive.

Stressors

The site was dived three times, and the canonical % bleaching (2nd training) column tracks the event: 0% on 16 April, 12.05% on 17 April, 36.47% on 2 May, within two points of the highest value anywhere in the dataset. The site-level Mean(%bleaching) cell is blank, so no site rank exists. The May photographs show a mosaic sorted by growth form rather than a uniform whitening — near-continuous fields of white tables, and beside them vast branching stands still in full dark pigment (e.g., Image 5).

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No crown-of-thorns, disease, or predation was seen.

Comparisons with other data

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