Maldives - Fesdhoo wreck

Setting

A small sunken ship gone thoroughly feral. In the gloom of the deeper frames the whole scene earns the photographer's own caption: ghost ship (e.g., Image 1, Image 17).

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General benthic features

Its masts and bollards have swelled into shaggy pillars of sponge and hydroid, a tan sea fan the size of a door spreads from the hull, and inside, the hold breathes with a single organism-like mass of glassy sweepers — thousands of translucent fish that part and reseal around a diver's light (e.g., Image 7, Image 11, Image 14, Image 22, Image 25, Image 2, Image 5, Image 8).

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Orange cup corals and crimson sponges paint the sheltered steel, a gray table coral has claimed the bow like a flag, and out on the sand a colony of garden eels sways half-out of their burrows, sinking away as divers drift near (e.g., Image 12, Image 13, Image 4, Image 10, Image 23, Image 24).

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Look for the giant clam's spotted mantle among the coralline-pink rubble, and the long black spines of an urchin tucked into the wreckage (e.g., Image 20).

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Coral cover

Coral cover: 14% — photo-derived, and the two methods broadly agree (15% vs 14%). This site's figure is the mean of two independent computer vision passes over Anderson's own frames: a DINOv3 calibrated point classifier reads 15.1% and a CoralSCOP computer vision reads 13.8%, a spread of 1.3 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. 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

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.