Philippines - Apo Island (Negros)

Setting

Apo Island lies off southeast Negros Oriental, reached by bangka from Malatapay pier on the mainland. It shows steep gray limestone cliffs and sea stacks undercut at the waterline, narrow pocket beaches built visibly of coral rubble and shell rather than terrigenous sand, a grassy lighthouse ridge, and a bangka fleet drawn up on the sheltered main beach. The most informative frame, his "Apo reefs", looks down from the ridge onto a broad shallow turquoise fringing reef flat with surf breaking along its outer edge and an abrupt color break to deep blue immediately seaward, consistent with the log's note of a deep wall through the middle third of the Chapel dive; the same frame shows a brackish coastal lagoon carrying a rectangular pen structure directly behind the beach berm, a land-based nutrient source sitting beside the sanctuary. Conditions are repeatedly overcast, with whitecaps and a heavy shorebreak.

Coral cover

No coral-cover estimate exists for this site from Anderson's own surveys, and neither computer vision model has been run, because there are no underwater frames to run them on. Cover here is external only. No coral-cover value exists for this site.

Stressors

Because there is no benthic imagery, bleaching, disease, recent mortality, and crown-of-thorns are not observable here rather than absent, and no coral genus can be assigned from these photographs.

Comparisons with other data

Reef Check's Apo Island Marine Reserve station sits 0.18 km from this site, close enough to be a site measurement rather than regional context: seven surveys from 1998 to 2003 averaging 34.4% hard coral, with 13.0% recently killed coral and no nutrient-indicator algae. The record's two nearby stations disagree in direction, the 0.18 km one falling from 61.2% in 1998 to 32.5% in 2003 while a second 0.30 km away rises from 52.5% in 1999 to 68.1% in 2003; a MERMAID-hosted survey at Katipanan Reef, 0.6 km away, gives 14.1% in 2023. These are independent Reef Check and MERMAID measurements, not CRD surveys of this site, and 1998 appears in the record twice, as 56.2% and 61.2%, so treat that year as unresolved. Apo's community-managed sanctuary is one of the most heavily studied marine reserves anywhere and its management history is documented in detail elsewhere; three papers on it sit in the CRD corpus, on export of adult fish biomass (1996), on spillover (2003), and on recovery of the reserve two years after an El Nino bleaching event (2002). Nothing beyond those titles is asserted here.

Dive record

Anderson's own dive log records three dives here on 18 February 2013: "Chapel" at 09:15 (21.3 m maximum, 25.0 C, 9.1 m visibility) and "Rock Point" twice, at 11:50 (18.0 m, 23.9 C) and 15:00 (17.1 m, 24.4 C).

Other notes

All 30 available frames in the iCloud folder were reviewed and every one is topside; there is not a single underwater photograph of this site, so the imagery documents the island and its reef geometry rather than its benthos.