King Reef (New Providence, west end)

Setting

King Reef lies off the west end of New Providence, about 2.4 km from Goulding Cay, which Anderson dived just before it on 13 October 2022; the map position is the GPS fix in the DiverLog record for this dive.

General benthic features

This is an elkhorn site, and the whole set turns on Acropora palmata (e.g., Image 48, Image 60, Image 71).

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Live colonies are not incidental — they appear in something like a fifth of the frames. Broad golden-tan blades fan out over low hardbottom and white sand in Image 47, Image 48, Image 49, and Image 53; a spreading multi-branched colony stands clear of the bottom in Image 58, Image 61, Image 64, and Image 67; Image 60 and Image 71 show tall candelabra colonies with clean growing margins silhouetted against bright blue water; Image 65 catches a wide, densely branched colony from below.

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Anderson's frames give the range in one sequence: a whole thicket (e.g., Image 66), a very large colony (e.g., Image 63), a small recruit growing on live rock (e.g., Image 37), a sparse, thin-branched colony recorded as struggling (e.g., Image 51), and a diver alongside a standing skeleton for scale (e.g., Image 52).

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The counterpart to all that live tissue is standing dead framework: bare, turf- and silt-crusted elkhorn branches still in growth position in Image 36, Image 42, Image 43, and Image 39 (recorded by Anderson as dead Acropora framework), and eroded branch stubs mixed into the pavement in Image 38, Image 40, and Image 50.

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Live and dead elkhorn sit side by side across the site. The reef matrix between the elkhorn is low-relief hardbottom and spur-and-groove pavement carrying a dense red, pink, and mauve crust of coralline algae, turf, and encrusting sponge (e.g., Image 7, Image 8, Image 20, Image 21, Image 31, Image 35, Image 55, Image 56), broken by broad expanses of rippled white sand and rubble (e.g., Image 2, Image 17, Image 18, Image 25, Image 69) and by a couple of narrow shaded swim-throughs and ledges (e.g., Image 22, Image 23, Image 25).

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Massive corals are present as scattered discrete heads rather than as a continuous framework: large brain corals with strongly meandering ridges, several of them intact and fully pigmented (e.g., Image 9, Image 34, and Image 44, the last two recorded by Anderson as healthy and not diseased), against one large gray, algal-covered dome recorded as dead (e.g., Image 33).

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Mustard-yellow to olive mounding colonies recur (e.g., Image 19, Image 24, Image 72, Image 73, Image 70), one of which Anderson recorded as a diseased poritid (e.g., Image 70).

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Plating and encrusting agariciid-type sheets stack under ledges and on shaded faces (e.g., Image 11, Image 12, Image 13, Image 31, Image 32), Image 6 is a close-up of an orange-brown large-calice colony on crusted rock, and small mounding and encrusting recruits are dotted across the pavement (e.g., Image 15, Image 16, Image 27, Image 41).

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Gorgonians — sea fans, sea rods, and sea plumes — stand along the higher spurs (e.g., Image 58, Image 61, Image 68, Image 72).

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Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 9.1% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 60 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.

Stressors

Health signals are reported qualitatively only. Some colonies are bleached: the Orbicella faveolata Anderson identified in Image 45 and a similar lobed colony in Image 10 are pale cream with their polyps intact, against otherwise pigmented surroundings, and a small finger-branching colony is stark white with live tissue beside a brown colony of the same form (e.g., Image 19). Image 70 Anderson recorded as diseased; Image 44 is explicitly recorded as not diseased, which is a useful pairing. Image 33 and Image 39 record complete mortality on a brain coral and on elkhorn framework respectively.

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No percentage of bleaching, disease, or mortality is estimated from these frames. No corallivores were evident.

Fish and other fauna

Big Caribbean giant anemones with fat, pale bulb-tipped tentacles are wedged into coralline rock in Image 29, Image 30, and Image 28, and Image 54 is a crab tucked into a crevice.

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Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, seventeen independent stations (AGRRA, Reef Check, and XL Catlin Seaview Survey) recorded station-year means of 0.7–23% hard coral cover between 2004 and 2019; the nearest, AGRRA at Tunnel Wall, 0.76 km away, read 4.3–7.0% between 2011 and 2019.

Other notes

Frame-level account from Anderson's photographs of the second Bahamas dive (73 edited frames); the dive log names that dive, at 11:35 on 13 October 2022, King Reef.