Philippines - Port Barton, Palawan: Alberguin wreck

Setting

The wreck is unmistakable: hull spars and pipework on gray silty sand, a bollard-like fitting, a curved painted metal ring, and a thin steel cable arcing off a mast stub (e.g., Image 22).

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The water is green-gray and turbid in every wide frame, silt filmed over almost every horizontal surface — visibility was poor (e.g., Image 13).

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General benthic features

Colonization of the metal is the story. One frame follows a turf-covered line carrying a small golden branching pocilloporid; another shows an old rope (Anderson's note), long lost and now overgrown with algae, hydroids, several golden-brown branching colonies, and tunicates (e.g., Image 1, Image 20).

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A branching colony identified as Pocillopora acuta has taken hold inside a hull opening (e.g., Image 2).

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Soft corals are prominent: a fluffy cream colony draped over a fitting, and pale pink trees on rubble (e.g., Image 3, Image 19).

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Hard coral highlights: tiered scroll-like plates with pale margins — the best structural coral in the set; massive coral domes with ring-shaped corallites sitting on the wreck debris; Plerogyra sinuosa bubble coral, twice, once as a full-frame macro of pale vesicles against red sponge; a euphylliid hammer coral in close-up, maroon tentacles tipped with white anchor-shaped knobs; a domed flowerpot-type coral whose polyps each show a bright blue oral disc; and a dome of long white-tipped polyps on the superstructure (e.g., Image 6, Image 8, Image 11, Image 14, Image 15, Image 21, Image 24, Image 25).

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Corymbose and bushy corals appear only as small colonies — Anderson's note that acroporids are rare here holds up (e.g., Image 9, Image 10, Image 23).

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Algae are heavy throughout.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 20% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 32 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.
• It is not a diver survey, and on a wreck it indexes hull colonization rather than reef cover: the value reflects wreck habitat, not reef decline.

Stressors

Several colonies are conspicuously pale — a cream pocilloporid, a whitish branching colony, a pale massive colony — but no lesions, no tissue-loss margins, and no crown-of-thorns appear anywhere (e.g., Image 7).

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Fish and other fauna

A lionfish over a dark whip/black-coral bush, a black headshield slug with electric-violet lines and a forked tail, cardinalfish, blue-green damsels, a Moorish idol, and cup sponges on the silt (e.g., Image 16, Image 17, Image 18).

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Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, seven Reef Check stations recorded station-year means of 15–34% hard coral cover between 1998 and 2019; the nearest, Reef Check at Paraiso Reef, 0.88 km away, read 31% in 1998.

Dive record

The Alberguin wreck, a hull resting on silty sand off Port Barton, dived 2017-01-20 (23.8 m max, 14.3 m mean, 27.8°C average, dive-computer minimum 27.2°C); 25 of the 38 frames on file were reviewed.