Philippines - Coron: Coral Gardens, Busuanga
Part of the regional summaries: Philippines - Palawan and Philippines
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Western Philippines (NOAA CRW virtual station)Coral Gardens, the day's reef dive, is dominated by overlapping foliose and plating corals including ridged plating corals interleaved with staghorn coral thickets and brain corals — high genus richness with no site-wide bleaching, despite persistently poor visibility. A blind Claude computer-vision point count puts coral cover around 41%.
Ang Coral Gardens, ang sisid sa bahura nang araw na iyon, ay pinangingibabawan ng nagpapatong-patong na foliose at plating coral, kabilang ang mga plating coral na may mga tagaytay na sumisingit sa mga kasukalan ng staghorn coral at sa mga brain coral — mataas ang bilang ng genus at walang pamumuti sa buong lugar, sa kabila ng palaging malabong tubig. Ayon sa blind point count ng Claude computer vision, humigit-kumulang 41% ang saklaw ng koral.
Salin ng buod na ito gamit ang AI; ang Ingles ang opisyal na bersyon.
One other CRD dive site with its own page within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.
24 of the 25 photographs on this page are shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.
Site description
Setting
Visibility was poor throughout; Anderson noted the visibility as terrible, which should temper any quantitative read of these photographs.
General benthic features
Coral Gardens is dominated by foliose and plating corals on a scale that fills nearly every wide-angle frame: overlapping whorls, scrolls, and shelves in tan, cream, and chocolate, most with clean pale growing margins, and among them colonies whose fine concentric ridging marks them as ridged plating corals (e.g., Image 4, Image 5, Image 6, Image 7, Image 8, Image 9, Image 12, Image 14, Image 18, Image 22).
One stand of plates is speckled a striking pink-red — dense pink-red polyps against pale skeleton (e.g., Image 11).
Interleaved with the plate carpet are branching and staghorn coral thickets, tiers of table corals, brain corals, a fleshy lobed cluster, encrusting colonies, a blue-green soft-coral bouquet, orange soft corals, crinoids, and a large gorgonian sea fan (e.g., Image 1, Image 2, Image 13, Image 15, Image 16, Image 17, Image 19, Image 20, Image 21, Image 23, Image 24, Image 25).
Anderson identified three corals — Galaxea, Seriatopora, and Pocillopora acuta — an unusually specific and useful record; the Galaxea colonies carpet a sediment-veneered pavement. Genus richness is high.
Coral cover
- Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
- Coral cover: 41% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 25 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.
Stressors
The reef reads healthy with no site-wide bleaching signal. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.
Fish and other fauna
A sea squirt shares the frame with a spotted synaptid sea cucumber (e.g., Image 3).
Comparisons with other data
We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. If you would like to share yours, please email us.
Dive record
The third dive of 27 January 2017, the day's reef dive, to a maximum of about 15 m.
CV model comparison
More info
A few colony-focused photos raise the mean; the median is the typical photo. No computer-vision method yet estimates coral cover accurately on new images, so treat this as indicative rather than a measurement; it is revised as the methods improve.More info
DINOv3 and CoralSCOP were run on the same photos and are listed for comparison. Coralscapes v2 is shown as its own row for comparison only: the author does not consider Coralscapes reliable for these photos, so it is low confidence and never enters any average or summary. No diver transect exists for this trip, so agreement between the rows is not accuracy, and no computer-vision method yet estimates coral cover accurately on new images; treat every row as indicative.| Method | Hard coral cover (%) | Photos (n) ± SE |
|---|---|---|
| In-house DINOv3 | 35.1 | n = 25 · SE 3.4 |
| CoralSCOP edited | 25.9 | n = 25 · SE 3.3 |
| Claude (edited photos) | 41.4 | n = 25 · SE 4.1 |
| Coralscapes v2 (low confidence, never averaged) | 66.8 |
The two computer-vision methods differ by 9.2 pp (25.9–35.1%) and read 6.3–15.5 pp below Claude's blind point count (41.4%); the headline is Claude's blind point count because no transect or manual count exists here.
See a more detailed, stand-alone version of this table.
Data & links
All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics. Data are from Coral Reef Diagnostics.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.