Indonesia - Banda Islands: Lighthouse

General benthic features

The wider frames show a reef whose framework is columnar and branching rather than tabulate: one is a flat of pale tan-cream columnar Porites-type colonies with brown foliose colonies and a mustard soft coral between them, broken by broad white sand and rubble channels, with surgeonfish and damselfish over it; another is a near-continuous field of salmon-tan fine-branched coral filling the frame, with a cream leathery soft coral, chartreuse crinoid, and a black antipatharian bush at the margin (e.g., Image 2, Image 3).

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The fourth reef frame is the poorest ground in the set: a slope of large angular boulders and broken reef blocks coated in gray-green turf and coralline algae, carrying only a handful of small colonies, with damselfish and surgeonfish over it (e.g., Image 5).

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Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 29% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 133 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

One close frame, which Anderson recorded as crown-of-thorns damage, shows two corymbose colonies, each roughly 30-40 cm across, stark white from base to branch tip with their structure intact, directly beside normally pigmented brown and olive colonies (e.g., Image 1); another frame of crown-of-thorns damage shows a white patch on a massive colony and a small white branching colony.

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Another frame from the same dive shows a live crown-of-thorns starfish wedged in a crevice beside a patch of freshly killed white skeleton. On 25 April, a meter-scale massive colony on sand was bleached, uniformly pale blue-white with its corallites visible. Its edges carry old partial mortality, patches now covered by algae. On the 26 April dive, pale to stark-white plating colonies and a stark-white branching colony were bleached.

Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, 21 independent stations recorded station-year means of 11–93% hard coral cover between 2014 and 2025; the nearest, Reef Check at Tanah Rata, 0.96 km away, read 38% in 2015.

Dive record

Three dives here on 25 and 26 April 2018 (16:35, 18:58, and 13:03; 54-61 minutes; max 13.7, 14.6, and 29.3 m; average 7-16 m) with dive-average water temperatures of 30.3-30.4°C (the dive-computer minimum was 30.0°C on every dive).