Maldives - Back Faru

General benthic features

But look closer: knee-high cauliflower corals compatible with Pocillopora are recruiting everywhere across the rubble (e.g., Image 8), massive dome corals soldier on (e.g., Image 18), and the fish never left.

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Coral cover

Coral cover: 14% — photo-derived, and the two methods broadly agree (14% vs 15%). This site's figure is the mean of two independent computer vision passes over Anderson's own frames: a DINOv3 calibrated point classifier reads 13.9% and a CoralSCOP computer vision reads 14.6%, a spread of 0.7 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 14–15% range: the two products have different denominators and should not be treated as one measurement.

Stressors

A year after the 2016 bleaching, whole terraces of dead framework here have been shrink-wrapped in pink crustose coralline algae (e.g., Image 1, Image 3) — nature's primer coat — with dead table corals still standing like abandoned furniture (e.g., Image 12) and crown-of-thorns seastars (plus their fresh feeding scars) hiding in the wreckage.

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Fish and other fauna

Dense black schools boil over the slope (e.g., Image 16), a titan-type triggerfish patrols the rubble (e.g., Image 9), morays — including a gape-jawed honeycomb moray — thread the crevices (e.g., Image 23, Image 25), and the macro hunt turns up a banded boxer shrimp (e.g., Image 20), Clark's-type anemonefish in a red-lipped anemone, and a giant clam flashing a blue-violet mantle.

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Comparisons with other data

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

Dive record

Dived three times across the trip, Back Faru reads like a field report on how a Maldivian reef rebuilds.