Indonesia - Komodo NP: Nando Point

Setting

Anderson's log describes tons of hard coral here, enough that it would have been a beautiful reef dive by day.

General benthic features

The five photographs are night close-ups, so they cannot show the reef at habitat scale. Two of them are close studies of what the log says Anderson went after — polyps. Branching coral tips fill the frame with every polyp fully extended, tiny tentacle crowns standing out in silver-gray rings over yellow-tan and green-tinged branches, with small scarlet crustaceans tucked deep in the branch axils (e.g., Image 4, Image 5).

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Coral cover

• No coral-cover figure is published for this site.
• Nothing on the map attaches a coral-cover measurement to this site — the account above is descriptive background, not a survey result.

Stressors

Anderson's dive log for this night dive (19 January 2019) notes tons of hard coral and great conditions, and records no bleaching, disease, or other stressor. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.

Fish and other fauna

The rest is invertebrate portraiture: a large red Spanish dancer, contracted, with its white gill rosette, on a mottled encrusting mat, a thick acid-yellow leafy sponge whose folds shelter a small white nudibranch marked with fine dark rays, and a banded tube-dwelling anemone (cerianthid) spreading long chocolate-and-cream striped tentacles over pale sand (e.g., Image 1, Image 2, Image 3).

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Anderson's log records monster Spanish dancers, foot-long nudibranchs, and shrimp on this dive.

Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, two independent stations (Reef Check and WWF-US / WWF-Indonesia) recorded station-year means of 53–55% hard coral cover between 2014 and 2016; the nearest, WWF-US / WWF-Indonesia at TNK04, 3.21 km away, read 55% in 2016.

Dive record

Nando Point in Komodo National Park, dived as a night dive on 19 January 2019 from 18:52 to 19:37, maximum depth 19.2 m, 26.7°C (dive-computer average; the log note reads 25.6°C) — Anderson's own log notes it would have been a beautiful reef dive in daylight, with "tons of hard coral", but was an atypical night dive in that the usual parade of nocturnal critters did not show up.