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 plate thicket (20 frames) is near-continuous laminar and vase coral, 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 toadstool leathers in dense stands, mauve and pale-pink finger-leather bushes, tree-like soft corals, tabulate and corymbose corals, bushy branching corals, columnar and massive corals, meandroid brains, and one very large plocoid dome, 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

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• 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.

Stressors

Several 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 table coral about two meters across carries an irregular, mottled white patch at its center that grades into normally pigmented tissue; the photograph cannot show whether it is pale tissue, recently exposed skeleton, or a predation scar. A small massive colony on sand carries several irregular white patches, and a plocoid faviid a smaller white patch. A large plate shows notched margins and a clean-edged through-hole, consistent with grazing or boring damage. No crown-of-thorns was seen. Stark-white leather corals recur across eight frames of the reef top among tan, olive, cream, and mauve leathers of the same growth form; Anderson identified them as bleached soft corals (e.g., Image 18, Image 20, Image 21).

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Fish and other 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

The nearest near-concurrent survey is Reef Check's 'Bandara' station, 1.08 km away, which recorded 21% hard coral in 2018: a different station and different observers, so a cross-check rather than 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 30.2°C, in clear water throughout.