Mauritius - Bamboo
Part of the regional summary: Mauritius
More info
Southern Mauritius (NOAA CRW virtual station)A Mauritius site where a low-relief base of rubble and pavement meets sections of near-vertical wall dropping into open blue, with patchy coral, mostly massive dome-shaped colonies. Dense clusters of long-spined Diadema urchins graze the open pavement, and a moray, a scorpionfish, a resting stingray, and bannerfish were seen.
Un site de Maurice où une base de débris et de dalle à faible relief rejoint des sections de tombant quasi vertical plongeant dans le bleu, avec un corail épars, surtout des colonies massives en dôme. Des groupes denses d'oursins Diadema à longues épines broutent la dalle dégagée, et une murène, une rascasse, une raie au repos et des poissons-cochers ont été observés.
Traduction par IA de ce résumé ; la version anglaise fait foi.
Twenty independent survey stations shown with the program’s logo — click one to see how far it is from this site.
One other CRD dive site with its own page within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.
15 of the 45 photographs on this page are shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.
Site description
Setting
Bamboo's reef structure combines a low-relief base of sand-veneered rubble and pavement with sections of steep, near-vertical wall dropping into open blue water (e.g., Image 1, Image 8, Image 9).
General benthic features
Coral cover was patchy and scattered, with live colonies interspersed among bare, turf- and coralline-algae-covered rock and rubble (e.g., Image 17).
Massive dome-shaped colonies were the most frequently encountered growth form, accompanied by foliose or plating corals, scattered branching colonies, massive brain corals, and at least one free-living, elongate mushroom coral (e.g., Image 3, Image 5, Image 7, Image 12, Image 15, Image 16, Image 19).
Non-coral life was conspicuous: red, orange, and pink encrusting sponges colored patches of bare rock, and dense clusters of long-spined, black Diadema-type sea urchins occupied open pavement, consistent with a heavily grazed bottom (e.g., Image 4, Image 6, Image 18).
Coral cover
- Reference: Mayfield et al. (2026, Platax), Table 3 (manuscript in preparation)
- CoralNet submission package
- Coral cover: 17% — Anderson Mayfield's manual point count of the photographs (Mayfield et al. 2026 Platax Table 3).
Stressors
No widespread bleaching was evident across the reef as a whole. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.
Fish and other fauna
Fish observed included damselfishes, butterflyfishes, a cleaner-wrasse pair, a schooling snapper/fusilier-type group, a pair of black-and-white bannerfish (Heniochus), a moray eel, a scorpionfish, a resting stingray, and a pipefish (e.g., Image 10).
Comparisons with other data
Apart from our own survey shown here, we found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, twenty independent stations recorded hard coral cover between 2018 and 2019: seventeen by benthic survey, station-year means of 0.0–29%, and three by MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats, station-year means of 13–30%; the nearest, Pisternick et al. 2020 (PANGAEA) at FEF_C_1_1 (Flic en Flac, Control), 1.09 km away, read 0.0% in 2018.
CV model comparison
More info
That convention would raise every Mauritius site by 0–3.7 pp. The Claude row is the manuscript's Claude (with image context) value, scored on the same frames as the manual count; one of its five sets of context images had been seen before, so it is not fully blind. Anemone Garden is anemone habitat rather than coral reef; its manual value stands but carries no error term. CoralSCOP (SAM-based mask-sum), edited photos: n/a — no edited copies exist; all 347 Mauritius photographs are unedited.| Method | Hard coral cover (%) | Photos (n) ± SE |
|---|---|---|
| Manual (reference) | 17.0 | |
| CoralNet | 11.8 | n = 40 |
| Coralscapes v1 | 13.0 | |
| CoralSCOP | 16.9 | n = 40 |
| DINOv3 | 19.9 | n = 40 |
| Claude (context) | 13.8 | n = 40 |
The four computer-vision methods differ by 8.1 pp (11.8–19.9%) and read within 5.2 pp of the manual point count (17.0%); the headline is the manual point count because a person's point count of the site's photographs is the reference the models are measured against.
The Coralscapes v1 row is shown for reference only, outside this comparison.
See a more detailed, stand-alone version of this table.
Independent surveys nearby
| Agency / program | Year(s) | Stations / distance | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pisternick et al. 2020 (PANGAEA) | 2018 | 17 stations, 1.09–2.83 km | Records ↓ |
| WCS Kenya / University of Mauritius via MERMAID (MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats) | 2019 | 3 stations, 2.32–2.51 km | Records ↓ |
Coral Reef DiagnosticsWithin 5 km, 20 independent survey stations recorded hard coral cover in 20 surveys between 2018 and 2019. The most recent nearby survey is from 2019, so these values predate recent heat stress. This site's own estimate (17%) sits 17.0 points above the nine station-year means up to 2 km away (all 0.0%); the methods differ, so the comparison is context, not a like-for-like test.
Collected by other programs using different methods (MERMAID is a data platform: each MERMAID row names the organization that did the survey, and its method is in the row's hover text), so these are context for the figures above, not a like-for-like comparison. Where a station was surveyed more than once, the cell shows either the range of its values or, as a single value, the mean of surveys made in one year. Station names are not dive-site names.
Show all 20 independent surveys
Data & links
- CoralNet image repository for this region ↗
- Photo portfolio ↗
- Coral Reef Diagnostics page for this area ↗
All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics. Data are from Coral Reef Diagnostics and the organizations named in the data sources above.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.