Indonesia - Komodo NP: Nando Point

Setting

The setting reads as a healthy, coral-rich Komodo reef with sandy patches.

General benthic features

The photographs bear that out. Two of them are close studies of what the log says he 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. A value will be added if transect data, an independent survey nearby, or a computer vision pass on Anderson's own photographs becomes available.

Stressors

No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores evident.

Fish and other fauna

The rest is invertebrate portraiture: a large fleshy pink-red solitary ascidian sitting on a mottled encrusting tunicate mat, a thick acid-yellow leafy sponge whose folds shelter a small white nudibranch or flatworm 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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Comparisons with other data

Also on record for this site: Spanish dancers-monster, foot-long nudibranchs, shrimp, this would have been a beautiful reef dive in the day time, as there was tons of hard coral.

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 at 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.