Raja Ampat - Mioskon

Setting

The 46 frames read as a fringing reef running off an island rather than an isolated pinnacle, and they split cleanly into three habitats.

General benthic features

The crest and upper slope are soft-coral country. Frames not shown here look across a reef top packed with cream, ochre, and yellow-green leathery octocorals in folded-cabbage and mushroom forms with tan massive domes set among them and pink coralline crust between. Image 30 and Image 37 are the densest frames in the set: whole bommie flanks shingled in foliose and laminar plates with cream leathers, yellow-green plating colonies, and fine branching colonies packed edge to edge. Image 26 and Image 33 are the same picture from a meter back — a bommie top carrying folded cream leathers, tan tabulate plates, fine white-tipped staghorn, and pale corymbose colonies together, with a diver's fins in the blue above it in Image 33. Image 47 closes the dive on a bommie of yellow-green folded lobes beside a pink octocoral carpet, with a small red fish holding station in the middle.

3037263347

The most distinctive thing in the photo set is the octocoral carpet. Image 40, Image 41, Image 42, Image 43, and Image 46 are five frames of dense honey-and-cream fine feathery octocoral blanketing entire bommie tops with polyps fully open, spilling over the edges onto white rubble. Image 43 is the close frame, filling the circle with nothing but open polyps and a crinoid tucked in among them.

4041424346

Open polyps everywhere, plus black-and-cream feather stars perched on the high points in Image 21, Image 43, Image 46, and a frame not shown here, arms fanned out, say the site was running current when Anderson shot it.

21

Hard corals are diverse and cover the whole size range. Tabulate and plating coral is everywhere — broad flat tables in Image 27, Image 4, Image 31, Image 37, Image 38, and Image 45, some tiered in overlapping stories — and there are dense fine-branched staghorn and bottlebrush thickets in tan and mauve (e.g., Image 34 is a whole frame of one).

27431384534

Massive domes are abundant and often large: pale helmet-shaped heads in Image 28, Image 4, and a frame not shown here, and a knobbly coarse-textured head in Image 4.

28

Foliose and laminar colonies form whole flanks as stacked whorls and shelves (e.g., Image 22, Image 37, Image 47), including yellow-green plating colonies with cupped margins. Image 12 and Image 18 are the two close-down frames, both showing a pale gray-green branching or foliose colony set in heavy pink and mauve crustose coralline algae.

221218

The third habitat is the sand. Several frames show wide, pale, near-empty carbonate sand-and-rubble plains with only scattered low colonies, black-coral bushes and small sponges — genuinely low-cover ground, and a large enough share of the photographs that it must be weighed against the photogenic bommie shots.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 12% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 47 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.
• The wide sand plains are the reason to be especially careful with a single site-level number here: cover at Mioskon is patchy by habitat, high on the bommies and near zero on the channels between them, and one figure hides that.

Stressors

Image 45 is the frame that matters: it shows possible bleaching in one branching colony (one frame), chalk-white with its branch structure fully intact and its tips normal, directly among normally pigmented tan acroporids and yellow-brown soft corals. That is the look of live, possibly bleached tissue rather than old dead skeleton, and several of the tan colonies around it carry pale branch tips. Set against that, Image 5 and Image 22 show broad tracts of pale, coralline- and turf-covered pavement and broken branching rubble with little live tissue, which reads as older mortality now consolidated.

5

No crown-of-thorns was seen. The white radiating animal in Image 3 is a white soft-coral cluster with long, feathery-tipped polyps (not a feather star or a seastar); no soft coral of the same kind sits beside it for comparison, so no bleaching is claimed for it, and the yellow one in Image 21 reads as a feather star.

3

No disease bands or lesions, and no anchor or blast damage in the reviewed frames. No bleaching percentage has been derived, and none should be: the GoPro's color behavior on this dive makes any pale-versus-white judgment across the set unreliable, and only the colony in Image 45 stands out clearly.

Fish and other fauna

The open sand is also where the rays are: blue-spotted stingrays lie flat on it in Image 13, Image 15, and Image 16, with a fourth animal likely in Image 14.

13151614

The fish are the other headline. Image 6, Image 7, and Image 8 hold a huge school of bluestripe snapper — vivid yellow with clean blue lateral lines — first as a wall pouring over the crest, then frame-filling at arm's length above the coral.

678

A frame not shown here is a tight ball of planktivores hanging in mid-water with the surface visible above. Image 28 and Image 37 show chromis and other damselfish clouds, and Image 28 also puts a loose school of pale-bodied fish in clean blue over a coral-capped bommie.

Comparisons with other data

Conservation International (CI) surveyed this site (Mioskun RAMS) in 2025, 0.17 km from the pin. Within 5 km, five independent stations recorded station-year means of 20–52% hard coral cover between 2016 and 2025; the nearest, Conservation International (CI) at Mioskun RAMS, 0.17 km away, read 35% in 2025.

Regional context, not a survey of this site: Razak et al. (2026) found no significant trend in hard coral cover on southern Waigeo, the large island north of the Dampier Strait (a rise of 2.1% per year at seven sites, surveyed by line-intercept transect at about 3–7 m in 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2010 by the Research Center for Oceanography of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, now part of BRIN); this is a trend for that location, not this site’s cover. The same study measured sea-surface warming of 0.28°C per decade over 1985–2023 at southern Waigeo, and NOAA bleaching alerts there in seven of the eight years from 2016 to 2023.

Dive record

Mioskon, Anderson's dive 28 of the 2018 Indonesian liveaboard, 22 October 2018, shot on Naoko's GoPro. Dive log: dived 22 October 2018, entry time 15:07, max depth 21.4 m, bottom time 63.0 min, temperature 28.0°C. Anderson's dive memo: "Used Naoko’s GoPro. This is a really beautiful site," with six to seven stingrays of two species and all different sizes.

Other notes

Anderson's own dive memo records abundant stingrays at this site, and the frames corroborate that. Divers appear in Image 1, Image 17, Image 32, Image 33, Image 35, Image 36, Image 38, Image 44, and Image 47.

11732353644