Indonesia - Komodo NP: Tatawa Kecil

General benthic features

Anderson's photographs show a genuinely dense but visibly disturbed acroporid reef; the log calls it a spectacular site for hard coral, with large areas at 5-9 m of 80-90% coral cover, including low-lying acroporids and finger poritids. One frame is a single large Acropora table, roughly a meter across, dark brown with a pale living rim, sitting directly on a bed of bone-white broken Acropora branches — the table is healthy, the ground it stands on is dead skeleton (e.g., Image 2).

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A wide slope frame repeats that pattern at scale: a pavement of white branch rubble and old consolidated skeleton with scattered live brown foliose colonies, a tan plating colony, and low green algal turf, dropping into blue water with small planktivores above it (e.g., Image 3).

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A substrate close-up in the same vein is mostly white Acropora fragments, dark red foliose macroalgae, pink and lavender crustose coralline algae, a yellow-polyped plating coral, and a small lavender soft coral (e.g., Image 1).

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Against that, other frames show the reef Anderson described: a vivid salmon-red branching Acropora with white-tipped branchlets, framed by green digitate Acropora, mustard finger coral, a purple encrusting colony, and gray-brown corymbose colonies at near-continuous cover; and a mid-range garden of Acropora thickets, feathery soft corals, a broad green encrusting sheet, and orange cup coral (e.g., Image 4, Image 5).

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Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 32% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 83 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table. These are computer-vision indices over photographs, not a diver transect.

Stressors

The photo review resolved no bleaching, disease lesions, or predation scars, and nothing man-made appears; however, a computer-vision point count called 0.7% of coral points bleached (3 of 83 photos). On one green-brown knobby colony, more than a dozen knob tops are bare and white, with sharp edges against the living tissue around them: recently dead, cause not stated (e.g., Image 35).

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Read the rubble as physical breakage on a current-swept slope, not as a diagnosed mortality event; these frames cannot date it.

Fish and other fauna

Reef fish in frame are small — damselfish and anthias. Anderson's log records two or three green turtles, a Napoleon wrasse, a manta ray toward the end of the dive, scorpionfish, and nudibranchs.

Comparisons with other data

Turicchia et al. (2018) surveyed this site (E Tatawa Kecil). Within 5 km, seven independent stations (Reef Check and WWF-US / WWF-Indonesia) recorded station-year means of 8.8–59% hard coral cover between 2016 and 2020; the nearest, Reef Check at Siaba Besar (Sector 1), 1.82 km away, read a mean of 51% in 2020.

Dive record

Anderson dived this site once, on 27 January 2019 (07:34, 60 min, max 22.3 m, average depth 7.9 m, 26.7°C dive-computer average). Anderson did not carry the slate on this dive and logged it from memory; the gallery is a selection of the photographs from the dive.