Maldives - Dhigurah Arches (night dive)

Setting

A short, torch-lit plunge after sunset, and the reef is unrecognizable from its daytime self.

General benthic features

Cup corals that spend daylight as drab knuckles have exploded into bouquets of luminous green polyps, every tentacle out and fishing in the dark (e.g., Image 1).

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A cauliflower coral wears a fuzz of feeding polyps, a fleshy soft-coral tree stands fully inflated, and the walls glow pink with coralline algae under the beam (e.g., Image 2, Image 3).

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Coral cover

Coral cover: not reported. This was a night dive, and its frames are close strobe-lit macro shots rather than wide reefscapes, so a photo-derived index would measure the lit subject and the framing rather than reef cover. The 28.8% figure computed from them was withdrawn on 2026-09-02 and is not published. Two independent computer vision passes were run over Anderson's own frames: a DINOv3 calibrated point classifier reads 31.3% and a CoralSCOP computer vision reads 26.3%, a spread of 5 percentage points. The map publishes a single figure so sites can be sorted against one another, but the honest statement of what is known here is the 26–31% range: the two products have different denominators and should not be treated as one measurement. This CoralSCOP and DINOv3-based number is not final: Anderson is actively scouting better CV models and will regenerate the estimate once one pans out.

Fish and other fauna

The night shift is out: a long-armed brittle star drapes itself across a boulder coral like a starfish made of whips, small wrasse doze wedged into crevices, and — if the photographer's caption is to be believed — an octopus slinks across the sand at the edge of the light (e.g., Image 4, Image 5).

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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

Thirteen minutes of bottom time, all of it spent nose-to-reef.

Other notes

No coral-cover figure is published for this site: it was withdrawn because the 9 frames reviewed are close strobe macro shots -- not one wide reefscape -- and a photo-derived index over frames like these measures the strobe-lit subject and the framing, not reef cover.