Kenya - Lower Mpunguti-site 2 (Kisite National Park)

Setting

The set is a shallow, sunlit reef flat, and most frames are shot straight down or at a low oblique onto it — sun banding is visible across the pavement in a third of them and there is no blue-water horizon anywhere in the sequence. Water is green-tinged and visibility moderate, well short of the clear blue at Coral Garden or Kisite site 4.

General benthic features

Frame by frame, this is a genuinely dense flat and an almost completely bleached one. The signature of the site is fine-branched corymbose Acropora growing as continuous multi-colony thickets rather than scattered heads: four consecutive frames near the end of the run are filled corner to corner with such thickets, every colony blanched to a uniform bone-white or pale lilac-white down to the branch tips, the individual rosettes still structurally intact with no algal overgrowth yet — recent bleaching, not old mortality (e.g., Image 4).

4

One frame is the best overhead record of the flat itself: near-total substrate occupancy, with mauve-purple foliose and encrusting plate colonies whose lobed margins have blanched white, yellow-green pocilloporid and small knobby colonies packed between them, coralline-crusted pavement filling the gaps — and at least two giant clams (Tridacna) set into the rock, the larger showing a thick, brilliant white fluted shell margin around a dark gape, a smaller one showing a green-mottled, apparently pigmented mantle (e.g., Image 1).

1

One frame stands apart. It is a low mound carpeted almost entirely in ruffled, cabbage-like leather soft corals (Sarcophyton/Lobophytum type) — dozens of colonies packed shoulder to shoulder across the whole rise, all a uniform pale cream-yellow rather than the usual olive-khaki — sitting over a dark rust-red algal turf, with small white branching Acropora dotted on the rock below (e.g., Image 3).

3

Algae are the other constant. Rust-red and olive fleshy fronds and dense filamentous green canopy blanket the pavement between coral stands in most frames, and one is almost nothing but that canopy over pale rock.

Coral cover

• Reference: Mayfield (2025)
• Data file: (Mayfield, 2025-Supplemental File S1)
• CoralNet submission package (accession #4963)
• Coral cover 34% — and 82% of hard coral tissue bleached (March-April 2024).
• Measured from 27 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.
• Across the 20 Kenyan sites the mean was 30% coral cover and 77% of tissue bleached.
• The full photographic set is consistent with that: the flat is well covered, and nearly everything on it is white.

Stressors

In one of the four bone-white thicket frames a single small pinkish-brown pigmented colony sits in the middle of that white field and is the only colored thing in the frame. Another frame shows the same growth form at wider scale: several distinct corymbose and tabular stands separated by sand and turf channels, grading from olive-yellow (pigmented) through pale gray-lilac to white across a few meters of reef. The massive corals — normally the growth form that holds on — did not here. Two frames capture the same pair of large nodular Porites-type domes, each roughly a meter across, one chalk-white and the other pale lilac-pink, both whitened over the entire colony surface with no pigmented margin left, standing on sand and green turf. Another frame has a second such pair overhead: a cream-white ridged dome beside a very pale lavender colony with one small turf-covered dead patch; the dark lines across it are the valleys between its lobes (shading and sediment), not tissue loss. Further pale nodular domes recur in two frames. One frame is the exception and the most informative single image on pattern: a large olive-brown digitate Acropora bommie that has kept most of its pigment but carries a stark snow-white bleached patch across its crown — partial-colony bleaching within one stand, alongside a cream-tan massive dome and pale gray digitate colonies. Another frame repeats that mosaic with the pale lilac-white and cream colonies dominant and olive-brown patches surviving between them (e.g., Image 2).

2

Soft corals were paling here alongside the stony corals, and they are not counted in the hard coral figure. Typical recent thermal stress: mean annual maximum of 4.9 degree heating weeks (2021-2025, NOAA CRW; Kenya virtual station).

Fish and other fauna

Fish are sparse: a pair of sergeant majors over a bleached tabular colony in one frame, scattered damselfish, small dark fish working the thickets. No large aggregation, no turtle, no ray, no crown-of-thorns, and no lesion or band suggesting disease anywhere in the 27 frames reviewed.

Comparisons with other data

REEFolution Foundation surveyed a station named Lower Mpunguti, 0.59 km away. Within 5 km, 26 independent stations recorded hard coral cover between 2008 and 2024: ten by benthic survey, station-year means of 0.0–66%, and sixteen by MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats, station-year means of 18–56%; the nearest, REEFolution Foundation at Lower Mpunguti, 0.59 km away, read 0.0–8.0% between 2017 and 2019.

Dive record

Surveyed 21 Mar 2024 in Kisite-Mpunguti Marine Protected Area during the 2024 Western Indian Ocean mass bleaching event — the eighth and last reef of the Shimoni run, shot 22 minutes end to end immediately after the neighboring Lower Mpunguti site. Surveys were run with REEFolution.