Oman - Daymaniyat Site 2

Setting

Daymaniyat Site 2 fringes a long, low, unvegetated islet of weathered tan limestone in turquoise water (e.g., Image 1).

1

The reef is shallow and the water clear: a turtle fins along just beneath the sunlit surface above a field of large rounded bommies (e.g., Image 2).

2

Coral is dense between the sand lanes: bushy Acropora meadows (e.g., Image 7), tiered plate stands (e.g., Image 16), and massive Porites domes (e.g., Image 6) roll between narrow sand channels (e.g., Image 13), with entire bommie tops sheathed in knobby soft-coral carpets (e.g., Image 14).

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Sea turtles cruise above the mound field, and clouds of damselfish and sergeant majors hang over the coral heads.

General benthic features

The reef is a mound field rather than a branching thicket: big rounded bommies sheathed in knobby, nodular coral rise straight out of bright white sand lanes, with a dark undercut ledge at one edge and damselfish scattered over the tops (e.g., Image 3).

3

One large mound is wrapped in tiered, overlapping laminar plates of a pale cream-yellow coral, stacked like a collapsed pile of dishes, with knobby colonies in pink, lilac, and buff crowding right up against it on every side and more mounds receding into blue behind (e.g., Image 4).

4

On the mounds, coral covers nearly all the hard bottom; sand, not algae, is what breaks it up.

Coral cover

• Reference: Mayfield (2025)
• CoralNet submission package
• Published hard coral cover is 38% — CoralNet point annotation from Mayfield (2025, Platax, Table 1; 30 points per photo, water and fish excluded) — with turf algae at only 3.6%, which is what Images 3 and 4 show.
• It carries the provenance of the paper it appears in and is not subject to the CoralSCOP/DINOv3 caveats applied elsewhere on this map.

Stressors

Very little bleaching was observed during these May 2024 surveys (about 0.02% of coral tissue area; Mayfield 2025), before the seasonal SST peak; NOAA CRW recorded Alert Level 2 heat stress and bleaching was reported along this coast from July 2024, weeks after the surveys. One dark, knobby massive colony carries about a dozen small cream-white spots on its lobe tops, bite marks or small patches of recent mortality (photo not shown).

Comparisons with other data

Sultan Qaboos University surveyed a nearby station (Dimaniyat - Turtle City (Deep)), 1.48 km from the pin; we could not confirm that it is the same reef. Within 5 km, seven independent stations (Environment Authority-Oman, Sultan Qaboos University, and submitted to MERMAID by Alhussaini A.) recorded station-year means of 0.0–35% hard coral cover between 2025 and 2026; the nearest, Sultan Qaboos University at Dimaniyat - Turtle City (Deep), 1.48 km away, read 35% in 2026.