Oman - Jissah Point (Muscat)

Setting

Jissah Point lies off Muscat's rocky headlands. The bottom is a mosaic: turf-covered pavement and rubble on sand, large boulders with overhangs, and sand gullies running between rock walls (e.g., Image 21, Image 22, Image 23, Image 24).

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Algal turf outranks hard coral, with scattered plating Montipora/Turbinaria-type colonies, brain corals, leather-coral banks, and blue-violet sea whips rising from the turf (e.g., Image 5, Image 8, Image 12, Image 14, Image 18).

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The green haze in these photographs is normal for this coast, where seasonal upwelling keeps the water turbid and plankton-rich; it is not evidence of a degraded site.

General benthic features

A green turtle settled among big banks of ruffled leather coral (Sarcophyton type) growing over sediment-dusted pavement and coarse sand, with one small gray meandroid brain coral nearby and a cleaner-wrasse-sized blue fish working the turtle's shell (e.g., Image 1).

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On the sand plain, a black-and-white speckled moray lay coiled on the open bottom beside two silvery goatfish-type fish nosing the sediment, with tufts of turf, small red macroalgae, and one gray knobby coral head (e.g., Image 2).

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Up close, the pavement is almost entirely sheathed in maroon turf and crustose coralline algae, with a single small bright-green fine-branched colony, a large brown long-tentacled anemone, and a patch of pale massive coral (e.g., Image 4).

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Coral cover

• Reference: Mayfield (2025)
• CoralNet submission package
• Published hard coral cover is 33% — CoralNet point annotation from Mayfield (2025, Platax, Table 1; 30 points per photo, water and fish excluded), against 35% turf on the same denominator.
• The published figure carries the provenance of the paper it appears in and is not subject to the CoralSCOP/DINOv3 caveats applied elsewhere on this map.

Stressors

Two colonies in Anderson's photographs are bleached: a pale blue-white encrusting colony with its polyps extended, paler than the colonies around it, and a small stark-white lobed colony beside tan colonies of the same form (two of the frames, not shown). These are the photo observations; the published values are unchanged. The dives were in May 2024, 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. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.

Fish and other fauna

The macrofauna included a resting green turtle (e.g., Image 1), a whipray (e.g., Image 10), a free-swimming moray (e.g., Image 17), a red frogfish (e.g., Image 3), a porcupinefish (photo not shown), and massed schools of grunt-type fish (e.g., Image 15).

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The frogfish, a deep blood-red Antennarius-type, sat on turfed rock beside slate-blue sea whips that lie low across the sediment, with bright sand behind (e.g., Image 3).

Comparisons with other data

David Feary (Oman-UAE project) surveyed this site (JussaPoint) in 2008, 2009, and 2012, 0.04 km from the pin. Cover values from that work are not among the survey records shown on this page. Within 5 km, two Sultan Qaboos University stations recorded station-year means of 25–53% hard coral cover in 2025; the nearest of these, Sultan Qaboos University at Qantab Main Beach (Deep), 2.85 km away, read 53% in 2025.