Rabbit Ears (Pompano Beach)

Setting

Light is dim and blue — the surface is not visible in any frame and the wide shots go dark and blue at mid-distance — consistent with a deeper ledge dive.

General benthic features

Across 18 edited frames the site presents as a low-relief southeast Florida hardbottom ledge whose dominant living structure is sponge, not stony coral. Giant barrel sponges, consistent with Xestospongia muta, are the defining feature and appear in ten of the eighteen frames. Image 1 shows a broad red-brown barrel sitting on sand-veneered rock with a yellow sea plume growing at its base.

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Image 4 is a tall red-orange barrel with red encrusting sponge skirting its foot.

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Image 14 is the best single specimen frame: a large orange-red barrel with a distinctly frilled, scalloped rim, a yellow grunt tucked at its base.

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Image 3 is a close frame at the foot of a barrel wall, where a spotted moray looks out of a hole beside a small gray-brown tube sponge, a blue encrusting patch (blue sponge or colonial tunicate — not separable here), yellow tube-sponge or zoanthid growth, and green algal turf.

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Image 8 is a smaller rose-to-mauve cup or vase sponge with a visibly ridged interior wall.

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Image 13 and Image 16 both show several barrels at once along the ledge, with orange encrusting sponge, gorgonians, and a sea fan; Image 17 is a tall barrel silhouetted in the haze; Image 10 is a wide of the ledge with multiple barrels standing above it.

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Image 18 looks directly down into a barrel's osculum, with a spiny snail shell lodged inside the opening (e.g., Image 18); no crab is visible in the shell.

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Other sponges fill in around them: the bright red rounded ball sponge in Image 6, red and orange encrusting sponge sheets in Image 4, Image 9, and Image 13, and the gray-brown tube sponge in Image 3.

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In Image 6 the red ball sponge is surrounded by long, slender, faintly banded whip-like structures radiating across the rock; these are either slender gorgonian branches or the arms of a basket star, and the frame does not settle which. Stony coral is present but sparse and confined to small, isolated colonies — there is no reef framework, no thicket-forming coral, and no Acropora anywhere in the set. Three frames carry identifiable colonies. Image 11 is a down-look on a single low, rounded colony with meandering tan ridges and pale valleys, sitting on turf- and macroalgae-covered rock beside a small gorgonian.

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Image 15 is the sharpest coral frame of the dive: a flat-topped, plate-like colony whose fleshy polyps are arranged in meandering series with mouths and tentacles clearly resolved, pale gray-brown.

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Both are meandroid corals; the photographs do not support a species call. Image 12 is a compact gray-brown dome of a large-polyp massive coral, its large corallites clearly resolved, on algal rock with a red-brown gorgonian branch alongside.

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All three colonies are small relative to the barrel sponges beside them, and all three sit in a matrix of algal turf and fleshy macroalgae rather than coralline pavement. Octocorals are the other continuous element: sea rods, sea plumes, and sea whips cover the low relief in Image 1, Image 2, Image 5, Image 10, Image 13, Image 16, and Image 17, with a sea fan in Image 16.

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Image 2 is the most useful habitat-scale frame — an open, gorgonian-dotted low-relief bottom with sand patches, receding into blue water, with midwater fish overhead (a chub-shaped fish and a blue-bodied fish, most likely creole wrasse, though neither is confirmed). Image 5 and Image 7 are the same habitat in worse water: gorgonian-studded low relief with no distinguishable coral.

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Image 9 is a close frame of algal-dominated hardbottom — green and red macroalgae over encrusting sponge — with a bearded fireworm (Hermodice carunculata) crawling across the algal turf.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 4.4% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 17 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

No bleaching, paling, or recent mortality is evident on any of the three stony colonies or on any sponge in this set — and none is quantified.

Fish and other fauna

Fish in the set are incidental rather than aggregated: midwater fish in Image 2, a yellowtail and a blue-bodied fish over the ledge in Image 10, a yellow grunt at the base of the barrel in Image 14, a spotted moray in Image 3, and a bearded fireworm in Image 9.

Comparisons with other data

Reef Check surveyed a nearby station (Horseshoe Reef) in 2014, 0.16 km from the pin. Within 5 km, 35 independent stations recorded station-year means of 0.0–8.0% hard coral cover between 2011 and 2024; the nearest, Reef Check at Abbey Too, 0.11 km away, read 4.4% in 2013.

Dive record

Rabbit Ears, an outer-reef site near Rabbit Ear Pass at Abbey Too Reef about a mile north of Hillsboro Inlet, Pompano Beach, dived 8 April 2022 as the second dive of the day (in at 11:05, 41 minutes, 17.7 m maximum, 25.0°C average, dive-computer minimum 24.4°C, murky green water).

Other notes

No divers, boats, mooring lines, fishing gear, or debris appear in any frame.