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. 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.

Coral cover

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 shows two corymbose Acropora colonies, each roughly 30-40 cm across, snow-white from base to branch tip with tissue still intact and structure undamaged: this is active bleaching, not dead skeleton, and it sits directly beside normally pigmented brown and olive colonies. Given the 30-degree logs, that is a real and dateable observation from this site.

Comparisons with other data

No independent survey was made at this exact site; the nearest ones are listed in the table below.

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 a logged minimum temperature of 30.0 degrees C on every dive - the warmest water in this whole photo queue.

Other notes

The frames record that. The fifth frame is an out-of-focus extreme macro of pale translucent polyps or cerata on a salmon body and cannot be identified.