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 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, with Echinopora-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, a large pink barrel sponge (e.g., Image 17), and brown branching sponges sprawling across the sand between coral heads (e.g., 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 finger-like branching Porites 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

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

One wire coral lying across a dark plating colony on the sand is stark white along its whole length: possible bleaching (one frame, Image 11); no hard coral colony appeared bleached in the 28 frames examined (a random subset of the 176).

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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 in those frames. Debris lies on the reef: a long corrugated, roofing-type sheet spotted with orange sponge rests across foliose plate corals on the mid-slope (e.g., Image 3), and a green-and-white printed wrapper is wedged under a red sponge at the reef base (e.g., Image 33).

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Fish and other fauna

Moorish idols, anthias, chromis, fusiliers, and damselfish in the water column; feather stars everywhere on the ridge (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

Titaheluw et al. (2020) recorded 11 to 15% live coral at two Maitara stations (Sari Mauli and Ake Bai) in 2019, and Ibrahim et al. (2022) counted megabenthos on the island's north coast in 2021; this dive has no GPS position, so we could not confirm that either is this reef.

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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