Maldives - Baa Atoll (Hanifaru)

General benthic features

Site 8: a high-relief reef front tumbling from a coral-crowded crest into deep blue, with terraced table Acropora, staghorn thickets, cauliflower Pocillopora, clouds of orange anthias, a school of bannerfish, and a nurse shark resting under a ledge (e.g., Image 10, Image 11, Image 12, Image 13).

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Site 9: a knife-edged coral ridge, the moodiest of the set — much of it shot by flashlight against dark water — with big Porites domes, pink coralline-crusted rock, honeycomb faviids, and a maze-patterned coral compatible with Psammocora, divers stretching measuring tapes across the slope (e.g., Image 2, Image 15, Image 16, Image 17, Image 18).

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Site 10, the last of the run: a gently sloping field of Porites domes and bommies some the size of armchairs, leather corals crowning the gaps, a lone table Acropora, and — the first hint of trouble at any of the five sites — scattered bone-white branch tips among the tagged colonies (e.g., Image 1, Image 3, Image 4, Image 6, Image 7, Image 8, Image 9, Image 14, Image 20, Image 21, Image 22, Image 23, Image 24, Image 25).

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Coral cover

Coral cover: 27% — photo-derived, from two computer vision methods. The figure is the mean of a DINOv3 calibrated point classifier and a CoralSCOP computer vision run over Anderson's own frames from this site. The site record does not carry the two individual method values, so the spread between them cannot be shown here; where both are recorded elsewhere on this map they routinely differ by 3-19 percentage points. Anderson keeps an eye out for newer CV models and will refresh this CoralSCOP and DINOv3 figure once a more trustworthy option is available.

Stressors

All three were tagged-and-measured monitoring work, photographed roughly three months before the 2016 El Niño bleached the vast majority of corals across Baa's study reefs. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores evident.

Comparisons with other data

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

Other notes

Three more January 2016 Baa Atoll research dives, parked here on the coarse atoll marker because the exact reefs (candidates include Kashidhoo Giri and Vinaneiy Faru, per Anderson's own bleaching spreadsheet) couldn't be geocoded from any public source — not necessarily Hanifaru itself.