Philippines - Verde Island Passage: Sombrero Island

General benthic features

Sombrero Island's wide-angle frames show dense coral over the ridge tops (e.g., Image 1).

1

Enormous tabular Acropora dominate — several plates meters across with clean pale growing margins, and one very large pyramidal plate structure standing clear of the slope (e.g., Image 31, Image 36, Image 42).

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Not all of them are healthy: the far half of the big table in Image 42 is pale, and another large tiered table is long dead, overgrown by turf and a bead-like green growth (e.g., Image 37).

37

Around them are extensive columnar and massive Porites, corymbose and branching Acropora, Pocillopora, and Stylophora, foliose and encrusting plates, brain corals, fungiids, and Euphyllia (e.g., Image 2).

2

Crinoids in green, yellow, and black are abundant, and whole walls are draped in red, pink, and orange soft corals and encrusting sponges; a barrel sponge, blue and orange encrusting sponges, yellow Polycarpa-type tunicates on massive Porites, and a giant clam with a mottled white mantle round out the benthos (e.g., Image 4).

4

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 17% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 43 of Anderson's edited photographs and unedited originals (14 edited and 29 unedited originals, because edited versions of most of this dive's photos do not exist; 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 or a transect; it is provisional and a better model will supersede it.

Stressors

There is no site-wide bleaching signal, but bleaching shows colony by colony: the far half of one big table is pale, partial bleaching (e.g., Image 42), and a lobed massive colony and its neighbor carry stark-white patches on the tops of the majority of knobs (e.g., Image 13).

13

A large tiered table is long dead and overgrown (e.g., Image 37); the pale margins on the other big tables are growing edge.

Fish and other fauna

Dense silverside and glassfish shoals shelter against the framework, with anthias, damselfish, butterflyfishes, moorish idols, and a large grouper or sweetlips at an overhang.

Comparisons with other data

Pinheiro et al. (2019) surveyed a nearby station (Sombrero Island, Tingloy), 0.31 km from the pin. Within 5 km, three Reef Check stations recorded station-year means of 36–70% hard coral cover between 2010 and 2014; the nearest of these, Reef Check at Inner Layag Layag Reef, 1.72 km away, read 64% in 2014.

Dive record

The final dive of the 2016 Philippines trip, on 1 October.