Maldives - Anantara Dhigu house reef

General benthic features

Few sights in the Maldives beat the top of this house reef in January 2016: tabletop corals by the hundred, tiered like café parasols and running unbroken to the edge of visibility (e.g., Image 1, Image 24, Image 25).

12425

Slip over the edge and the slope turns wilder — rubble and pink coralline crusts, ledges daubed with red sponge, orange anthias swirling mid-water, and a river of silvery fusiliers passing overhead (e.g., Image 3, Image 4).

34

A January 22 drift along the reef's sheer outer wall found faces tiled in brilliant yellow soft corals -- the classic livery of a current-swept Maldivian drop-off -- set off by red sponge and pink coralline crusts, glassy sweepers seething beneath a feather star, fusiliers and damselfish streaming along the rim, and a spiny lobster giving itself away by its banded antennae.

Coral cover

Coral cover: 31% — photo-derived, and the two methods disagree by 13.2 pp; treat cover as a range (24–38%). This site's figure is the mean of two independent computer vision passes over Anderson's own frames: a DINOv3 calibrated point classifier reads 24.4% and a CoralSCOP computer vision reads 37.6%, a spread of 13.2 percentage points. The map publishes the mean so sites can be sorted against one another, but the honest statement of what is known here is the 24–38% range: the two products have different denominators and should not be treated as one measurement.

Stressors

Months later the 2016 El Niño would bleach these reefs catastrophically; these photos catch the reef in full, oblivious health. Flag: the last frame of that dive holds a crown-of-thorns starfish out on the rubble, a likely author of stark white feeding scars on a couple of table corals upslope -- three months before the same reef was bleached by the 2016 El Nino.

Fish and other fauna

The dive belonged to a honeycomb moray: boldly patterned in giraffe-print black and white, it posed for portrait after portrait and then did something morays rarely do in daylight — slid fully out of its hole and swam free across the open reef (e.g., Image 6, Image 7, Image 22).

6722

A spiny lobster's banded antennae gave away its hiding place under an overhang, and a sea cucumber sprawled across the coral.

Comparisons with other data

No independent survey was made at this exact site; the nearest ones are listed in the table below.

Dive record

Two more dives at this house reef followed later in the trip. On January 25, the trip's oddest dive toured the resort's underwater restaurant and the coral nursery planted around it: geodesic domes sprouting transplanted cauliflower and staghorn corals, some thriving and fist-sized, others toppled casualties in the rubble, with diners visible through the glass overhead and anemone carpets and damselfish crowding the terrace below.