Mauritius - Carpenter
Part of the regional summary: Mauritius
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Southern Mauritius (NOAA CRW virtual station)A Mauritius boulder field of stacked coral heads and rock with sand channels between. Massive boulder colonies dominate alongside table corals and brain corals, with dense schools of snapper and chromis overhead and no widespread bleaching.
Un champ de blocs mauricien fait de têtes coralliennes et de roches empilées, séparées par des chenaux de sable. Des colonies massives en blocs dominent, aux côtés de coraux tabulaires et de coraux cérébriformes, avec des bancs denses de lutjans et de chromis au-dessus et aucun blanchissement généralisé.
Traduction par IA de ce résumé ; la version anglaise fait foi.
Seven 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.
13 of the 48 photographs on this page are shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.
Site description
Setting
Carpenter is a low-relief boulder and patch-reef structure built from stacked coral heads, rubble, and rocky substrate rather than a wall or slope, with sand and rubble channels separating reef hummocks (e.g., Image 1, Image 5, Image 16).
General benthic features
Massive boulder colonies dominated the framework, interspersed with table and plating corals, meandering brain coral heads, and foliose growth (e.g., Image 4, Image 7, Image 14).
Live cover was patchy, concentrated on the upper surfaces and flanks of the boulders (e.g., Image 6).
Coral cover
- Reference: Mayfield et al. (2026, Platax), Table 3 (manuscript in preparation)
- CoralNet submission package
- Coral cover: 15% — Anderson Mayfield's manual point count of the photographs (Mayfield et al. 2026 Platax Table 3).
Stressors
No widespread bleaching was evident; the pale olive-gray coloration of many massive boulder colonies is consistent with their natural tissue color (e.g., Image 20).
A few colonies were bleached, among them a small branching colony that is cream-white beside a fully pigmented maroon neighbor of the same form (e.g., Image 47); Anderson's own point annotations label it bleached hard coral.
A crown-of-thorns starfish was photographed under a ledge (e.g., Image 9).
Fish and other fauna
Dense schools of snapper-type fish and chromis/damselfish moved over the boulder field, with surgeonfish, a scorpionfish, and a trumpetfish also recorded (e.g., Image 13, Image 18, Image 19).
Comparisons with other data
University of Mauritius and WCS Kenya (via MERMAID) surveyed a nearby station (Coin de Mire), 0.69 km from the pin; we could not confirm that it is the same reef. Within 5 km, seven independent stations recorded hard coral cover between 1999 and 2019: two by benthic survey, station-year means of 46–89%, and five by MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats, station-year means of 10–98%; the nearest, WCS Kenya / University of Mauritius via MERMAID (quadrats) at Coin de Mire, 0.69 km away, read 10% in 2019.
CV model comparison
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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) | 15.0 | |
| CoralNet | 10.9 | n = 40 |
| Coralscapes v1 | 13.0 | |
| CoralSCOP | 21.0 | n = 40 |
| DINOv3 | 21.2 | n = 40 |
| Claude (context) | 12.3 | n = 40 |
The four computer-vision methods disagree by 10.3 pp (10.9–21.2%) and read within 6.2 pp of the manual point count (15.0%); 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reef Check | 1999 | 1 station, 2.81 km | Records ↓ |
| Surveyor not identified (2016 Indian Ocean bleaching survey) | 2016 | 1 station, 3.22 km | Records ↓ |
| WCS Kenya / University of Mauritius via MERMAID (MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats) | 2019 | 3 stations, 0.69–3.77 km | Records ↓ |
| WCS via MERMAID (MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats) | 2016 | 2 stations, 3.26–4.78 km | Records ↓ |
Coral Reef DiagnosticsYear-average (illustrative only, programs differ; quadrats left out)Within 5 km, 7 independent survey stations recorded hard coral cover in 8 surveys between 1999 and 2019. The most recent nearby survey is from 2019, so these values predate recent heat stress. This site's own estimate (15%) sits 5 points above the one survey station up to 2 km away with MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats (10%); the methods differ, so the comparison is context, not a like-for-like test.
Collected by other programs using different methods (Reef Check uses point-intercept transects; 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. Values above 70% are marked “best patch”: surveys often target the densest coral on a reef, so these may overstate the site as a whole.
| Agency | Site / location | Date | Hard coral cover (%) | Distance | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reef Check | Island Reef, Anse La Raie | 1999 | 46% | 2.81 km | — |
| Surveyor not identified (2016 Indian Ocean bleaching survey) | ALR/ALBC (Mauritius) | 2016 | 89% best patch | 3.22 km | — |
| WCS via MERMAID (MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats) | ALR/ALLC | 2016 | 98% best patch | 3.26 km | Briand J, Darling E. 2016. 2016 bleaching surveys. MERMAID |
| WCS via MERMAID (MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats) | Bain Boeuf | 2016 | 71% best patch | 4.78 km | Briand J, Darling E. 2016. 2016 bleaching surveys. MERMAID |
| WCS Kenya / University of Mauritius via MERMAID (MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats) | Coin de Mire | 2019 | 10% | 0.69 km | Darling E, McClanahan T, Muthiga N. 2019. Mauritius 2019-2020. MERMAID |
| WCS Kenya / University of Mauritius via MERMAID (MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats) | Anse le Raie | 2019 | 50% | 3.26 km | Darling E, McClanahan T, Muthiga N. 2019. Mauritius 2019-2020. MERMAID |
| WCS Kenya / University of Mauritius via MERMAID (MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats) | Anse le Raie - Backreef | 2019 | 38% (2 surveys) | 3.77 km | Darling E, McClanahan T, Muthiga N. 2019. Mauritius 2019-2020. MERMAID |
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.