Indonesia - Halmahera: Maitara North

Setting

Maitara North is the north side of the small volcanic cone of Maitara, the island that sits in the strait between Ternate and Tidore, dived on 9 August 2026 during the Halmahera crossing aboard the liveaboard Ambai (Wallacea Dive Cruises).

General benthic features

The habitats. The dive is built around a shingled foliose plate field that covers whole faces of the slope, tier on tier of thin, whorled, up-turned plates consistent with Montipora (M. aequituberculata/foliosa-type) with Echinopora lamellosa-type colonies mixed in — in several frames it is the only thing in the picture, running unbroken from the foreground into blue water, which is exactly the "shingling tower" of the field note (e.g., Image 14, Image 15, Image 40, Image 41).

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Above and between those faces sits a sponge- and coralline-dominated pavement ridge: crimson, scarlet, and orange encrusting sponges, tan barrel and knobbly tube sponges, pale blue-gray branching tube sponges (Callyspongia-type), pink and mauve crustose coralline algae, bushy red-brown gorgonians, wire, and whip corals, and dense yellow and black feather stars (e.g., Image 4, Image 9, Image 23, Image 51, Image 54).

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Hard coral there is a mix of laminar and encrusting Montipora, brown and gray Pachyseris/agariciid plates, Turbinaria-type cups, cerioid Favites/Dipsastraea-type heads, dome-shaped Porites, and a green Cyphastrea/Goniastrea-type massive with pink polyps (e.g., Image 28).

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A coarse sand and rubble apron runs below the reef, and the near-zero frames come from it — open pale sediment with scattered coral fragments, one large fluted giant clam (Tridacna) with a black-and-cream mottled mantle, and a big mauve fleshy colony beside it (e.g., Image 17, Image 33, Image 37).

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The shallow reef top, photographed under surface light at the end of the dive, is a different reef again: low-relief pavement carrying digitate and corymbose Acropora, tan branching Porites cylindrica-type stands, Pocillopora, and encrusting Millepora-type colonies among clouds of anthias and damselfish (e.g., Image 20, Image 35).

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Coral cover

Coral cover. Coral cover: 33% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 171 of Anderson's unedited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.

Stressors

Condition. No unambiguously bleached colony appeared in the 28 frames reviewed. The plate fields photographed without strobe read uniformly pale gray-tan, but that is depth-driven color attenuation, not paling — the same colonies shot with strobe show normal olive-brown and lavender pigment (e.g., Image 50, Image 53).

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What the frames do show is sediment: fine silt sits in the cups of many plates, and one broad mid-slope terrace is an old, consolidated field of dead branching coral bound by turf and coralline. No crown-of-thorns, no Drupella aggregations, and no active disease lesions were recorded.

Fish and other fauna

Fauna. Moorish idols, anthias, chromis, fusiliers, and damselfish in the water column; feather stars everywhere on the ridge; the giant clam on the apron (e.g., Image 22, Image 31).

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The blacktip shark and the large Napoleon wrasse from the dive log are not resolved in the sampled stills.

Comparisons with other data

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

Dive record

The dive reached 28.3 m at 26–27°C.

Other notes

Anderson's field note reads: "black tip, huge Napoleon, shingling tower of Montipora (?)" — and the photographs make the third of those the defining feature of the site (e.g., Image 2, Image 5, Image 13).

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