Maldives - Vilivaru Giri (night dive)

Setting

After sunset the reef changes shifts, and this torch-lit dive caught the night crew at work: branching corals wearing fuzzy halos of extended polyps, a long-spined Diadema urchin marching across the open, and a banded brittle star sprawled like dropped rigging.

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 The 24.5% figure computed from them was withdrawn on 2026-09-02 and is not published.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 26.6% and a CoralSCOP computer vision reads 22.3%, a spread of 4.3 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 22–27% range: the two products have different denominators and should not be treated as one measurement.

Stressors

No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores evident.

Fish and other fauna

The macro finds kept coming — a pale nudibranch freckled in yellow on orange sponge, an elongate flatworm gliding over coral, urn tunicates with green-ringed mouths clustered like tiny amphorae, and an unidentifiable jet-black slug plowing a lonely furrow across the sand. Anemones bloomed into shag carpets of tentacles, small clownfish huddled deep inside one, and the beam found a coral hind grouper in its evening finery — burning orange-red, spangled all over with electric blue spots.

Comparisons with other data

A published figure above about 70% usually reflects the surveyors choosing the most coral-rich part of the reef, so read it as a best-patch number rather than a site mean.

Other notes

No coral-cover figure is published for this site: it was withdrawn because these 17 frames are strobe-lit macro/critter shots -- several contain no scleractinian coral at all -- and a photo-derived index over frames like these measures the strobe-lit subject and the framing, not reef cover.