Indonesia - Komodo NP: The Cauldron / Shotgun

General benthic features

The five frames read as a transect through the habitats he describes. Two are the acroporid community: one wide frame is a dense pale corymbose Acropora thicket in the foreground with several lavender-gray tabulate plates stacked behind it, mustard finger coral above, and olive soft corals between, at near-continuous cover with anthias threading the branches; the other frames two large Acropora tables, the nearer roughly two meters across and brown, the further mustard-tan, above a patch of bare pale rubble, with pink-brown soft-coral carpets and clean sand in the foreground and fusiliers overhead (e.g., Image 4, Image 5).

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One frame is the scoured, soft-coral-dominated ground: a longfin batfish hanging over a substrate of pale mint-green Sinularia-type heads on dark red encrusting sponge and coralline rock, with a red-and-yellow sponge and a small anemone, in visibly hazy water and with almost no hard coral in view (e.g., Image 3).

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The sand apron gives the other two: a whip-tailed ray gliding low over a coarse sand plain dotted with small isolated coral clumps in murky blue-violet light, and a close frame of a camouflaged ghost pipefish tucked against dark algal clumps on shell sand beside a small black-and-white damselfish - his log records an ornate ghost pipefish at the very end of that dive (e.g., Image 1, Image 2).

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Coral cover

Coral cover: 26% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 62 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, and each averages across acroporid thicket, scoured soft-coral pavement, and open sand.

Stressors

No bleaching, disease lesions, or predation scars are resolvable, and nothing man-made appears.

Comparisons with other data

Also on record for this site: 2019-1-21 dive 3: Shotgun/Cauldron (#10). I did this dive in 2009 and it was one of my favorite dives I’d ever done. Darkly pigmented Pocillopora acuta @ 22 m (not integrated into reef matrix). Small massive poritids, Tubastrea, high diversity of mostly small Acropora, Pachyseris, Seriatopora caliendrum/Stylophora pistillata, monster snapper, Pocillopora verrucosa. Pocillopora eydouxi=rare, large barrel sponges, encountered area with no coral, only CCA-encrusted rubble. Large nurse shark in the distance (first of trip). Montipora, among the most impressive Acropora of the trip-abundant and diverse.

Dive record

Anderson dived this site in August 2009 - logged at the time as his best dive ever - and again on 21 January 2019 (15:04, 53 min, max 23.5 m, average 13.1 m, 25.6 degrees C, about 10 m visibility, strong current, and thermoclines).