Indonesia - Komodo NP: Tatawa Kecil

General benthic features

They show a genuinely rich but visibly disturbed acroporid reef. 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, the two remaining frames are the reef he 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

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

No bleaching, disease lesions, or predation scars are resolvable, and nothing man-made appears. 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 - matching his note that diversity was high but mean size small.

Comparisons with other data

Also on record for this site: 2019-1-27 dive 1: Tatawa Kecil (#32): 7:34-8:34 (60 min). I didn’t take my slate, so going entirely on memory. Saw 2-3 turtles (green) and the biggest Napoleon wrasse of the trip. Also saw a manta ray towards the end of the dive. Encountered large areas from 5-9 m with 80-90% coral cover, including low-lying acroporids and finger poritids.

Dive record

Anderson dived this site once, on 27 January 2019 (07:34, 60 min, max 22.3 m, average 7.9 m, 26.1 degrees C), and lost his slate, so the five photographs are the closest thing to a record.