Maldives - South Male Atoll

Part of the regional summaries: Maldives - Central (Male Atolls / Ari / Vaavu) and Maldives

Country

Maldives

Survey date(s)

—

Coordinates

3.9500, 73.5000

Coral cover

—

not yet measured

Observations

bleaching

Heat stress

Today’s heat load

29.7°C 0.0°C-weeks

16 Sep 2026 · Bleaching Watch

5-year thermal stress load

5-year mean max. degree heating weeks (DHW)

2.2°C-weeksⁱ

2021–2025

NOAA Coral Reef Watch — Maldives virtual station

i 5-year mean max. DHW is the mean of the annual maximum DHWs over the five complete years named above, not conditions today.

More info

Maldives (NOAA CRW virtual station) · Maldives ecoregion mean=2.9°C-heating weeks

Three independent survey stations shown with the program’s logo — click one to see how far it is from this site.

Ten other CRD dive sites within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.

Site description

Setting

South Male Atoll is a central Maldivian atoll (3.95 N, 73.50 E), immediately south of North Male across the Vaadhoo Channel.

Coral cover

No photographs, coral-cover estimate, or written account is attached to this site, and no survey sits close enough to describe this reef.

Stressors

Satellite five-year mean annual maximum heat stress: 2.2 degree heating weeks. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores evident.

Comparisons with other data

The nearest is Gulhi Island Backreef, 5.04 km away, at 19.4% in 2022. At 5 km this describes the surrounding area, not this reef. Worth noting as area context: the whole 18-survey set tops out at 30.9%, so cover in this part of the atoll chain reads consistently low - a pattern consistent with the Maldives' basin-wide bleaching mortality in 1998 and 2016, though these data cannot attribute it.

Independent surveys nearby

Data availability near this site
Agency / program	Year(s)	Stations / distance	Link
Montefalcone et al. (2020)	2015	1 station, 3.52 km	Records ↓
XL Catlin Seaview Survey	2015–2017	2 stations, 0.40–1.13 km	Records ↓

Within 5 km, 3 independent survey stations recorded hard coral cover in 4 records between 2015 and 2017. Of the 1 station surveyed in more than one year, 1 changed by less than 5 percentage points between their first and latest surveys. The longest record, transect 37035 (XL Catlin Seaview Survey, 0.40 km away), went from 7.1% in 2015 to 5.5% in 2017. The most recent nearby survey is from 2017, so these values predate recent heat stress.

Collected by other programs using different methods (the XL Catlin Seaview Survey uses photo-transects with automated image annotation), so these are context for the figures above, not a like-for-like comparison. Where a station was surveyed more than once the range is shown. Station names are not dive-site names. Values marked best patch exceed 70%: surveyors usually chose the richest area, so they are not site means.

Independent survey data near this site
Agency	Site / location	Date	Hard coral cover (%)	Distance	Link
XL Catlin Seaview Survey	transect 37035	2015–2017	5.5–7.1% (2 images)	0.40 km	—
XL Catlin Seaview Survey	transect 37036	2015	38%	1.13 km	—
Montefalcone et al. (2020)	Cocoa Corner	2015	76% best patch	3.52 km	HeatCRD database

Data & links

Data on this page are from the organizations named in the data-sources table above, not Coral Reef Diagnostics; Coral Reef Diagnostics has no survey of its own at this site.