Raja Ampat - Karang Paradise

General benthic features

This is a hard coral-dominated sea mount, and the dive-8 set is overwhelmingly about coral rather than fish or soft coral. The wide frames (see Image 27, Image 4, Image 68, Image 75, Image 77, and a frame not shown here) all show the same thing: continuous reef running away into blue-gray haze in every direction, with no wall, no drop-off, and no bare sand horizon in the frame.

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Ambient light is dim in a good half of these, and backscatter is visible, so the wide frames read structure well and color badly. Anderson's dive-log note from this dive says "still can't figure out mystery coral: long, separate corallites as tubes... Attack tentacles but only extended within colony so maybe for fishing? It was the most dominant species at site." Anderson's own later photo labels answer that: they name it Galaxea, including colony, corallite, polyp, sweeper-tentacle (e.g., Image 80) and dead-skeleton shots.

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The imagery matches them: several macros show pale, separate, tubular corallite walls with fine dark speckling; many more show dense fields of long tentacles each ending in a distinct pale knob, growing out of dark tubular corallites, interspersed with bare white circular corallite mouths; two show the same polyp field at medium range. Image 80 catches the mechanism Anderson was puzzling over — a gap in the polyp carpet exposing the colony's interior with longer, differently-formed tentacles reaching into it. Image 75 shows the colonies at scale — smooth-textured mounds filling the frame and running on into the haze, the very large colonies Anderson's log describes. Massive corals are everywhere: Image 48 is a pale gray knobby-nodular colony with bivalves set into it, Image 50 and Image 51 are big lobate and rounded domes standing clear of the pavement, Image 37 has a large dome with regular honeycomb dimpling in the foreground, and Image 60, Image 61, Image 52, and Image 36 are further dome-and-pavement frames.

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Meandroid brain corals appear in Image 39, as a broad ridged plate under a massive colony in Image 53, and again in Image 51.

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Foliose and laminar plate growth covers large areas: Image 16, Image 45, Image 47, Image 58, and Image 59, the last a near-circular plate lying on sand with fine radial texture.

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Branching thickets are the third element: a dense gray staghorn stand running into blue, a fine olive-green branching thicket filling the frame, and further branching fields, one mixing a maroon-pink branching colony into a yellow-green one (e.g., Image 28, Image 41, Image 74). Image 21 is a bushy green-yellow field with two divers passing above and a Moorish idol at the edge. Image 67 shows pink-mauve corymbose colonies alongside yellow-green ones. Image 15 is the most mixed frame in the set — yellow-green lobate, pink-red branching, lavender lobate, and pale plate growth all in one view. Image 18 is a golden-brown lobate colony, Image 32 is a macro of a fine tabular surface with white-tipped polyps, and Image 54 and Image 44 are macros of pale plating colonies with separated corallites and extended polyps — the second unidentified plating species Anderson's log records. Image 2 is the striking one: a brilliant scarlet meandroid colony sitting among brown branching and lobate corals, an unusually saturated red for a stony coral. Image 7 and Image 19 are dense orange anthias over knobby coral pavement. Image 46 is a dark red barrel sponge cluster standing on sand — Anderson's log records a 2 x 2 x 2 m "monster" barrel sponge on this dive, though nothing in the frame gives scale to confirm it is that one. Image 64 and Image 5 are pink barrel-sponge surfaces, one with orange Dendronephthya against it, the other showing an oscule and a band of tiny violet ascidian-like beads along the sponge margin. Image 1 is the Christmas-tree-worm frame — a smooth massive colony carrying Spirobranchus crowns in orange, scarlet, navy, rose, and mint, with an embedded scallop showing a crimson-and-gold mantle. Image 73 is a green nodular colony against pink coralline crust. Image 10, Image 11, Image 12 (with a diver and bubbles), Image 14, Image 34, Image 38 (diver above), Image 43 (diver with torch), and Image 78 (orange crinoids and mixed coral against blue) fill in the general reef.

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The frames show a structurally intact, coral-dominated reef with very large old colonies.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 44% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 132 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.
• All of these figures are computer-vision indices from photographs, not a diver survey.
• There was no benthic transect on this dive.
• Note also that Anderson's log describes 100% cover in places at 10 m and in the shingled coral at depth.

Stressors

Image 76 is the dead half of the story: white bare corallite tubes with a green algal film.

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Past mortality is present but consolidated: Image 76 is bare white Galaxea skeleton under algal film, Image 20 has standing dead branch stubs, and coralline-encrusted rubble appears through several pavement frames — consistent with Anderson's own log note of dead Anacropora rubble at 9-10 m. Image 22 shows one bleached colony: a stark-white branching colony, its white grading to cream and pink toward the base, inside an otherwise deeply pigmented green branching Acropora stand.

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Some mortality is recent. On several large colonies of the site's dominant coral (Anderson's Galaxea), a band of clean, bare white corallites, their polyps gone, runs between living tissue and older skeleton under algal film, and irregular bare white patches sit inside living tissue: tissue-loss lesions, cause not stated (photos not shown; the same pattern appears in about ten more frames). Fishing gear: a thin fishing line is snagged across the branch tips of a staghorn thicket and runs on over the large massive colony beside it (e.g., Image 34), matching the "fishing gear damage and fishing waste" in Anderson's log for this dive. No crown-of-thorns or macroalgal overgrowth was seen.

Fish and other fauna

Image 26 puts those knob-tipped tentacles against a vivid red animal, a small crab sheltering among them.

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Anderson's log opens this dive with "a large school of small jacks", and the frames carry it: Image 23, Image 24, and Image 42 are all mid-water schools of silver jacks/trevally streaming past over the reef. Image 13 is a large tan-tentacled anemone-form animal on the reef, Image 20 is a busy reef top with crinoids and another anemone, and Image 66 is a big orange crinoid perched on the framework.

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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

Anderson dived Karang Paradise twice on 16 October 2018. The second was entered at 11:33 and lasted 62 minutes, to 15.1 m (Anderson's log calls it "dive 2" at the site); the photographs on this page come from both dives.

Other notes

The first dive of the pair (07:36, 55 minutes, to 33.0 m) was the hammerhead dive: the log records Anderson's second hammerhead ever, which swam in from the deep blue and passed within several meters of the divers several times, though no good pictures of it came out. The photographs on this page come from both dives.