Oman - Daymaniyat Site 2

Setting

Frame 1 sets the scene from the surface: a long, low, unvegetated slab of weathered tan limestone lying in turquoise water under a cloudless sky — the rocky islet this reef fringes (e.g., Image 1).

1

Frame 2 is taken from high in the water column, a turtle finning along just beneath a sunlit surface with a field of large rounded bommies laid out below in blue shadow; it fixes the reef as shallow and the water as clear, but nothing on the bottom is resolvable in it (e.g., Image 2).

2

General benthic features

The two frames that carry real benthic information are 3 and 4, and both show the same thing: a mound field rather than a branching thicket. In frame 3, big rounded bommies sheathed in knobby, nodular coral rise straight out of bright white sand lanes, one dark undercut ledge at the left edge, damselfish scattered over the tops (e.g., Image 3).

3

Frame 4 is the closest look and the best of the set — a single large mound 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

Coral covers essentially all the hard bottom in both frames; sand, not algae, is what interrupts it.

Coral cover

Published hard coral cover is 51% — manual CoralNet point counts from Mayfield (2025, Platax), a diver-scored value rather than a computer vision estimate — with turf algae at only 5.3%, which is exactly what these two frames look like. 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

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

Comparisons with other data

Also on record for this site: A shallow fringing reef off a low rocky islet where the coral is nearly unbroken: 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. No bleaching observed during these May 2024 surveys, 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.