Maldives - Kashidhoo Faru

General benthic features

One of the lushest reefs of the January 2016 Baa Atoll surveys — a rolling slope smothered in coral, where giant rosettes of thin, whorled plates stack like heads of ancient roses beside dense staghorn thickets with lilac-blue branch tips (e.g., Image 6, Image 18, Image 23, Image 24).

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A vivid yellow-green table coral crowns one rise, and deeper down the reef turns into a waving green meadow of long-polyped colonies.

Coral cover

Coral cover: 26% — 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 — this is a portrait of the reef at its peak, just before. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores evident.

Fish and other fauna

Clouds of slender silver fish stream over the thickets (e.g., Image 17), damselfish hold territories among the plates, and a scarlet feather star hides in the branches.

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Comparisons with other data

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

Other notes

Look for the field marks of working science: numbered tags zip-tied to corals, a ruler laid against each tagged colony (e.g., Image 1, Image 2, Image 14), and a researcher's wrist computer reading 13.2 meters.

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