Maldives - Gaagandufaruhuraa

Setting

A shallow reef terrace off a little snorkel island in Baa Atoll, where a rubble-strewn flat tips suddenly over a steep slope into deep blue water (e.g., Image 23).

23

General benthic features

The stars are cauliflower-shaped pocilloporid corals — some tan, some a striking dark olive-green — alongside stubby-fingered staghorn relatives, lobed boulder corals, and a maze-patterned brain coral, with soft leather corals sprawled near the transect tape (e.g., Image 5, Image 11, Image 16, Image 22).

5111622

Macro frames dive right down to the polyps, tentacles out and feeding (e.g., Image 2, Image 7).

27

Coral cover

Coral cover: 45% — 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.

Stressors

Months later the 2016 El Niño bleached the vast majority of corals on Baa's reefs, making these photos a portrait of the reef in its final healthy season. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores evident.

Comparisons with other data

No prior survey data from this site. If you would like to share yours, please email us.

Dive record

This was a working research site: look closely at the wide shots and you'll spot numbered plastic tags zip-tied to individual corals, each colony measured against a steel ruler as part of a January 2016 monitoring baseline (e.g., Image 1, Image 13).

113