Indonesia - Komodo NP: Padar Island (Padar Kecil)

General benthic features

The photographs are dominated by soft coral, which is worth saying plainly because this site carries a high cover figure. Two wide frames are almost wall-to-wall octocoral: rust and orange Sinularia trees, olive-green tufted soft corals, cream and lavender convoluted leathery colonies of the Lobophytum and Sarcophyton type, and rust-red nephtheids, running unbroken into blue water with only narrow white sand channels and a tan plating coral for contrast; a blue-and-yellow butterflyfish, a longnose butterflyfish, and a parrotfish are the fish in frame (e.g., Image 4, Image 5).

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This is exactly the belt he logged as nearly all soft coral from 5 to 10 m, blanketing the benthos. The hard coral evidence is one close frame: a dark green branching Acropora bush with pale and bare branch tips, and immediately below it a large orange-brown mushroom coral with a pale margin - one of the hundreds of fungiids he found piled at 2-4 m - set among red sponge, magenta crustose coralline algae, and a crinoid (e.g., Image 1).

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One frame is the wreck itself: a hazy view along a heavily fouled hull, uniformly coated in turf and green fouling growth with a dark hold opening, and no coral recruits visible at that scale, consistent with his note that it carried urn tunicates and barnacles but few recruits (e.g., Image 2).

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Coral cover

Coral cover: 8.1% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 56 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

No bleaching or disease lesions are resolvable. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores evident.

Fish and other fauna

The last frame is a superbly camouflaged frogfish, pink and olive mottled to match the coralline-encrusted rock it sits on, betrayed only by its mouth line (e.g., Image 3).

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Comparisons with other data

Also on record for this site: Got good pictures and even a video to show how abundant they were. Flying gurnard (second of trip/life), Stylophora pistillata, sand @ 14 m (with garden eels). Small coral bommies at 15 m but mostly sand. Cool, CCA-coated scorpionfish, larval nudibranchs growing on soft coral. Plerogyra, Pachyseris, never-before-seen ascidian (colonial), first pipefish of trip, 1 Pocillopora acuta, beautiful mantis shrimp (got good pics). Also featured tunicates and damselfish nests. Fungia only hard coral common above 5 m, though some Acropora tables also present.

Dive record

One dive, 23 January 2019, 14:40, 65 minutes, max 22.3 m by his log, 25.6 degrees C, 5-10 m visibility, and weak current, on a site built around a small wrecked fishing boat.