Indonesia - Ambon: Rhino City (Laha)

Setting

The second Laha muck dive of 2018-04-22. Visibility ran moderate-to-good, clearer over the reef-flat than the sandy muck (e.g., Image 1).

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General benthic features

Rhino City splits into two zones: sandy muck carrying isolated soft-coral "trees" and gorgonian fans in cream, blue-gray, and purple, and a genuinely dense, healthy reef-flat section of thick Acropora staghorn/table thickets swarming with damsels and anthias (e.g., Image 2, Image 3).

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Anderson's identifications include a large Diploastrea heliopora, Pocillopora acuta, and massive Porites; the frames also show brain corals, leather corals, and a large frilly gray-white plating colony.

Coral cover

• Reference: CoralSCOP computer vision (this site's photos)
• Coral cover — completed photographic analysis.
• CoralSCOP produced usable masks for 65 of 66 photographs (one ghost-pipefish macro frame failed), with a mean computer vision estimate of 33% (SD 21; median=31%; range=0.9–80%).
• The result accords with the image set's broad habitat split—locally dense Acropora tables and thickets in the shallows, then much sparser sand/rubble muck with isolated soft corals—but it is not a randomized benthic survey.
• Because the selected reef vistas and macro portraits have different sampling footprints, and no independent point count or second image method is available, 33% is shown as a provisional photographic index rather than as transect-equivalent site cover.
• Coral cover: 33% — a single-method photographic index. This was a muck dive: the photographs pool coral patches with sand, silt, and rubble bottom that is not reef, so the value describes that mix, not the cover of a reef.
• The figure is a CoralSCOP computer vision over Anderson's own photographs (65 frames), with no second method to cross-check it.
• CoralSCOP sums retained mask fractions with overlaps possible and segments coral-shaped objects rather than living tissue, so it scores standing dead skeleton as coral and does not measure cover the way a transect does; against in situ transects it reads high.

Stressors

No crown-of-thorns or disease observed; a Culcita cushion star is present but distinct from Acanthaster. One small massive colony, whose coloring Anderson noted as unusual, shows possible bleaching (one frame, Image 50): pale tissue around red-centered corallites.

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A dark-red Acropora colony has partial mortality: several of its lower branches are white and dead (e.g., Image 41, Image 42).

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In one of Anderson's unedited frames a gillnet is draped over a branching coral (e.g., Image 49).

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Fish and other fauna

A notable find is a genuine Rhinopias (weedy scorpionfish), heavily camouflaged, filamentous green/purple skin, motionless on sand, photographed in five frames (e.g., Image 12, Image 23, Image 30, Image 46), alongside a likely dark-morph ornate ghost pipefish and a blue-phase ribbon eel photographed both calm and in an open-mouthed threat display near a diver's hand (e.g., Image 8, Image 38).

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A banded black-and-white crinoid and a well-camouflaged purple crab round out the macro life (e.g., Image 15).

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Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. If you would like to share yours, please email us.