Indonesia - Banda Islands: Airport (Banda Ara)

Setting

The site runs from a deep sand apron up a genus-rich slope to a shallow reef top, with one long stretch of monospecific plate thicket in between.

General benthic features

The habitat zones. The plate thicket (20 frames) is near-continuous laminar and vase coral, Turbinaria- and Pachyseris-type, ruffled whorls in tan-brown and gray-blue running to the visibility limit with damselfish and butterflyfish through them — essentially wall-to-wall living coral (e.g., Image 1, Image 4, Image 5, Image 6, Image 13, Image 14).

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The mixed slope (46 frames) is the bulk of the dive and the genus-rich part of it: tan and olive Sarcophyton and Lobophytum toadstool leathers in dense stands, mauve and pale-pink Sinularia bushes, Dendronephthya, tabulate, and corymbose Acropora, Pocillopora, columnar, and massive Porites, meandroid brains, and one very large plocoid dome consistent with Diploastrea heliopora, with gorgonian sea fans, black coral, and pink-mauve barrel sponges through it (e.g., Image 2, Image 3, Image 7, Image 8, Image 9, Image 10, Image 11, Image 12, Image 15, Image 16, Image 17, Image 19, Image 23, Image 24, Image 25).

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A sand apron (9 frames) at depth holds isolated bommies, a sea pen standing alone on open rubble, and a series of single-colony close-ups.

Coral cover

Coral cover. Coral cover: 38% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 72 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table. This is the figure published here. Anderson is still comparing computer-vision models, and these figures will be updated as the methods improve.

Stressors

Condition. Three things stand out and none is reef-wide. One branching colony consistent with Stylophora is stark white to pale green across roughly half its surface with normal tan pigment on the rest — unambiguous partial bleaching of a single colony. A tabulate Acropora table about two meters across carries a sharply bounded patch of bare white skeleton at its center, clean-margined against healthy tissue: recent tissue loss, consistent with white syndrome or a healed-over predation scar, which the photograph cannot separate. A small massive colony on sand carries similar white lesion bands along its margins, and a plocoid faviid a smaller white patch. A large Turbinaria-type plate shows notched margins and a clean-edged through-hole, consistent with grazing or boring damage rather than disease. No crown-of-thorns was seen. Stark white Sarcophyton leather corals recur across eight frames of the reef top, but they sit among tan, olive, cream, and mauve leathers of the same growth form in the same frames, so this reads as the ordinary color range of the genus and is not scored as bleaching (e.g., Image 18, Image 20, Image 21).

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Fish and other fauna

Fauna. Chromis, damselfish, fusiliers, butterflyfish, and a batfish over the reef top; crinoids, gorgonian sea fans, black coral bushes, and a large fish sheltering under a fallen barrel sponge.

Comparisons with other data

Different station, different observers: a near-concurrent cross-check, not a repeat of this site.

Dive record

Airport (Banda Ara) was dive 5 of the 2018 Banda trip, on the morning of 26 April 2018: in at 09:43 for 61 minutes, to a maximum of 30.5 m and an average of 14.63 m at 29.44°C, in clear water throughout.