Mauritius - Ti Korail
Part of the regional summary: Mauritius
More info
Southern Mauritius (NOAA CRW virtual station)A low-relief Mauritius patch reef and rubble-sand flat where isolated healthy coral heads sit among bare, sediment-covered ground, under dense schools of bluestripe snapper and fusiliers. Notable sightings included a large porcupinefish, an Eschmeyer's scorpionfish, an octopus, and garden eels.
Un pâté corallien à faible relief à Maurice et un fond de débris et de sable où des têtes coralliennes isolées et saines reposent sur un substrat nu chargé de sédiments, sous des bancs denses de lutjans à bandes bleues et de fusiliers. Observations notables : un gros poisson-porc-épic, une rascasse d'Eschmeyer, un poulpe et des anguilles-jardinières.
Traduction par IA de ce résumé ; la version anglaise fait foi.
Four 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.
19 of the 44 photographs on this page are shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.
Site description
Setting
Ti Korail is a low-relief patch reef and rubble/sand flat rather than a wall or slope, with scattered coral heads and small bommies rising from broad areas of open sand and coral rubble (e.g., Image 5, Image 10, Image 13).
General benthic features
The larger colonies were massive dome-shaped corals and brain corals, together with smaller branching and digitate colonies, occasional foliose plates, and mushroom corals scattered across the rubble (e.g., Image 2, Image 6, Image 7).
Live coral cover was highly patchy, with isolated healthy colonies set against an otherwise bare, sediment-covered substrate (e.g., Image 3, Image 11).
Coral cover
- Reference: Mayfield et al. (2026, Platax), Table 3 (manuscript in preparation)
- CoralNet submission package
- Coral cover: 7.0% — Anderson Mayfield's manual point count of the photographs (Mayfield et al. 2026 Platax Table 3).
Stressors
No widespread bleaching was evident. A few small branching colonies were bleached, with stark-white or cream-white branches (e.g., Image 20, Image 27), and Anderson's own point annotations label them bleached hard coral.
No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.
Fish and other fauna
Dense schools of bluestripe snapper and silvery fusilier-type fish moved over the reef flat, accompanied by clouds of small blue damselfish (e.g., Image 1, Image 4, Image 16, Image 17, Image 19).
Individually notable sightings included a large spotted porcupinefish, a triggerfish, a lionfish, and a well-camouflaged Eschmeyer's scorpionfish (Rhinopias eschmeyeri) (e.g., Image 8, Image 9, Image 18).
Other fauna included an octopus, a long-spined black sea urchin, and garden eels over the sand (e.g., Image 12).
Comparisons with other data
Reef Check surveyed a nearby station (Island Reef), 0.32 km from the pin; we could not confirm that it is the same reef. Within 5 km, four independent stations recorded hard coral cover between 1999 and 2016: three by benthic survey, station-year means of 30–89%, and one by MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats, 71%; the nearest, Reef Check at Island Reef, 0.32 km away, read 30–61% between 1999 and 2000.
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) | 7.0 | |
| CoralNet | 10.6 | n = 40 |
| Coralscapes v1 | 13.0 | |
| CoralSCOP | 20.5 | n = 40 |
| DINOv3 | 21.9 | n = 40 |
| Claude (context) | 7.4 | n = 40 |
The four computer-vision methods disagree by 14.5 pp (7.4–21.9%) and read 0.4–14.9 pp above the manual point count (7.0%); 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 | 1999–2000 | 2 stations, 0.32–3.70 km | Records ↓ |
| Surveyor not identified (2016 Indian Ocean bleaching survey) | 2016 | 1 station, 4.90 km | Records ↓ |
| WCS via MERMAID (MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats) | 2016 | 1 station, 1.32 km | Records ↓ |
Coral Reef DiagnosticsYear-average (illustrative only, programs differ; quadrats left out)Within 5 km, 4 independent survey stations recorded hard coral cover in 5 surveys between 1999 and 2016. The one station surveyed in more than one year declined by 31 points between its first and latest surveys. The longest record, Island Reef (Reef Check, 0.32 km away), went from 61% in 1999 to 30% in 2000. The most recent nearby survey is from 2016, so these values predate recent heat stress. This site's own estimate (7.0%) sits 23.0 points below the range of these station-year means up to 2 km away (30–61%, excluding 1 best-patch value above 70% that is not a site mean); 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 | 1999–2000 | 30–61% (2 surveys) | 0.32 km | — |
| Reef Check | Island Reef, Anse La Raie | 1999 | 46% | 3.70 km | — |
| WCS via MERMAID (MERMAID bleaching-protocol quadrats) | Bain Boeuf | 2016 | 71% best patch | 1.32 km | Briand J, Darling E. 2016. 2016 bleaching surveys. MERMAID |
| Surveyor not identified (2016 Indian Ocean bleaching survey) | ALR/ALBC (Mauritius) | 2016 | 89% best patch | 4.90 km | — |
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.