Kenya - Dolphin Point (Kisite National Park)

Setting

A gently sloping hardground terrace at roughly 5-12 m, broken by low ledges, rubble aprons, and sand pockets, with open blue water off the drop.

General benthic features

This is, unambiguously, a tabulate Acropora reef. Something close to half the set is given over to plate colonies a meter and more across — two frames open the dive with them, and long runs of frames later in the dive are almost nothing else. The tables sit edge to edge across the terrace so that the middle-distance skyline becomes a horizon of overlapping discs, and in one spot three plates stack on a single stalk above a staghorn tangle. Divers appear in seven frames and give the scale: the largest tables are wider than a diver is tall. Branching and corymbose acroporids fill the space between and beneath the tables — a chest-high tan bush, a dense pink-and-tan corymbose thicket, tight corymbose heads, and a stiff, thick-branched orange-brown colony that is the most saturated coral in the set (e.g., Image 3).

3

Five frames show mixed acroporid thickets running to the frame edges in tan, dusty pink, and lilac. Massive corals are the second element rather than the first: a brown lobed Porites-type dome, a meter-plus tan dome carrying an old linear scar, pale cream lobed mounds, gray domes, a large brown foliose/laminar colony, and one striking meandroid brain with violet-blue walls and green valleys (e.g., Image 2).

2

Soft corals are a real presence — pink and mauve Dendronephthya-type trees in three frames, and a ruffled yellow Sarcophyton-type toadstool in two frames. Anemones cluster in numbers in two frames, with an anemonefish alongside the Acropora bush. Crinoids perch on the tables in three frames; a sand-and-rubble patch is carpeted with blue Linckia-type seastars; brown fleshy macroalgae runs along several ledge tops.

Coral cover

• Reference: Mayfield (2025)
• Data file: (Mayfield, 2025-Supplemental File S1)
• CoralNet submission package (accession #4963)
• Coral cover 40% — and 62% of hard coral tissue bleached (March-April 2024).
• Measured from 108 white-balanced photographs taken at this site during the 2024 Western Indian Ocean mass bleaching event and point-annotated in CoralNet, published in Mayfield, A.B. (2025) A Citizen Science Approach for Documenting Mass Coral Bleaching in the Western Indian Ocean. Environments 12(8):276. doi:10.3390/environments12080276.
• This is a published diver-photograph point-annotation value, not a computer vision estimate, and it is not recomputed here.
• Across the 20 Kenyan sites the mean was 30% coral cover and 77% of tissue bleached.

Stressors

Bleaching is severe and it is emphatically not confined to one growth form. The frames are color-adjusted, so paling has been read from structure rather than absolute tone: the calls below are colonies that are bare white with corallite detail intact, sharp margins against dark pavement, and no algal turf on the skeleton. One frame is an entire branching thicket bleached bone-white; two others each set a brilliant white massive lobed colony beside fully pigmented neighbors; another has white plating fragments in otherwise tan pavement; three more carry white colonies scattered through wide shots; one is a cluster of eight or more bone-white branching and corymbose colonies in a single frame; another puts a stark white branching colony against a dark chocolate massive; one more is a large white foliose colony under a yellow soft coral. Three frames Anderson singled out close the set and make the point directly — a bleached table lying pale on the flat, a bone-white branching colony, and, in one noted as severe bleaching, a bright white massive Porites lobe immediately beside an equally white branching Acropora (e.g., Image 4).

4

Beyond those unambiguous cases, most of the big tables read pale cream to mustard rather than brown, which is what a 62% tissue-bleaching figure looks like across a table-dominated reef. Pigment is far from gone: four frames hold deep tan, pink, and lilac acroporids, and the massive domes in three others are solidly brown. The reef reads as a mosaic, but a pale one (e.g., Image 1).

1

No crown-of-thorns seastar appears in any of the 99 frames reviewed, and no unambiguous disease lesion is visible. Typical recent thermal stress: mean annual maximum of 5.1 degree heating weeks (2021-2025, NOAA CRW; Tanzania virtual station, whose polygon covers the Kisite-Mpunguti area). Seawater here was an estimated 31.4°C during the survey (read from the TG7 underwater camera and not validated, per Mayfield 2025, Environments 12:276, Table 1; the Kenya survey-wide mean of 32.0°C matched the 1998 event), and NOAA's Kenya virtual station recorded a peak of 13.5 degree-heating weeks on 18 April 2024, a level not reached there before in records going back to 1985; the Tanzania virtual station that covers this reef peaked at 16.0 on 16 April 2024. For the 2024 Kenya survey as a whole, Mayfield (2025, Environments 12:276) estimated that in situ temperatures ran about 1.3°C above NOAA's, so that "nearly 22 DHWs may actually have transpired"; those in situ readings came from the TG7 underwater camera and have not been validated.

Fish and other fauna

Fish are inconspicuous — a yellow snapper, a fusilier over a table, scattered damsels and anthias. No dolphins appear in the set, despite the name.

Comparisons with other data

REEFolution Foundation surveyed a station named Dolphin Point, 0.40 km away. Within 5 km, ten independent stations (REEFolution Foundation, WCS Kenya / WCS Tanzania via MERMAID, and WCS Kenya via MERMAID) recorded hard coral cover between 2008 and 2020: four by benthic survey, station-year means of 0.0–53%, and six by MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats, station-year means of 32–56%; the nearest, REEFolution Foundation at Dolphin Point, 0.40 km away, read 20–41% between 2017 and 2019.

Dive record

Dived 21 Mar 2024 in Kisite Marine National Park, during the 2024 Western Indian Ocean mass bleaching event. Surveys were run with REEFolution.