Raja Ampat - My Reef

Setting

Anderson's own note that the dive was "dark on account of diving so early" is visible in the photographs themselves: the deep frames are dim, green-blue and low-contrast, and it is only in the second half of the set that the light and color come up.

General benthic features

The first frames are from the deep part of the dive. Image 1 is shot straight down onto a large gray-brown foliose/encrusting plate with a bright white active growing margin, sitting in a bed of pink crustose coralline and red encrusting sponge, white crinoid arms entering at the top and a small finely-ridged concentric disc colony at the upper right.

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A frame not shown here pulls back to a dim, hazy low-relief bottom — sand patches, turf clumps, small crinoids, damselfishes, and a banded sweetlips-type fish low in the frame — the least coral-dominated view in the set. A frame not shown here is the large spotted ray lying on open sand; Anderson's dive notes record this as the marble ray, the first of the trip, and the frame is exactly as the notes predicted, soft and low-contrast from the borrowed G11. A frame not shown here is a tight close-up of a pale brown fine-branched digitate colony wedged between a gray finger sponge and vivid red encrusting sponge with crinoids and magenta coralline around it. A frame not shown here has a diver in the upper frame over a low-relief bottom carrying several flat-lying pale brown laminar plates. Image 6 is the first genuinely dense frame: a reef top shingled with brown laminar plating colonies, all with white margins, damselfishes and anthias in the water above. Image 7 is the tightest deep close-up — a large plate covered in fine concentric ridges with a brilliant white margin, abutting a pale encrusting colony, in red sponge. Image 8 is a mixed slope of layered plates, encrusting brown colonies, and green algal patches. Image 9 packs pale gray plates with white rims, green tube/urn sponges, and a yellow-green branching Acropora into one frame against blue water.

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The next frames are from the mid-depth reef face. Image 10 is a vertical close-up of a yellow-green fine-branched colony under a gray disc plate, with green feather-like growth below. Image 2 is a reef face heavily coated in red and pink coralline and red sponge, with plating colonies scattered through it. Image 12 is the most conspicuous single colony of the deep half: a large pale green-white foliose sheet with irregular lobes and open perforations, growing across a mauve coralline base. Image 13 is a high-relief mixed patch — a massive dome, brown plates, a sinuous meandroid brain coral low center, crinoids, and red sponge. Image 14 splits the frame between layered brown-mauve laminar plates on the left and a dense white-gray branching thicket on the right, with orange soft coral between. Image 15 is a heavily blue-teal cast vertical frame — a pale bushy branching colony center, teal crinoids above, red and orange sponges below, and a coarsely textured dome at lower right — color is unreliable here, so it is described at growth-form level only. Image 16 is a broad pale table plate in the foreground with concentric ridging; Image 17 is a hazy distant view of a pale table plate on a low ridge and is good only for gross form. Image 20 is a wide reef top of rubble, turf and red coralline with a pale lavender-gray plate at lower right, and Image 21 shows the same reef top with a brown bushy gorgonian/soft coral at right. Image 3 is one of the strongest frames of the dive — large pale tan tabular plates stacked with white margins, fusiliers streaming over them. Image 23 is the densest coral frame in the set: a high-relief ridge of overlapping pale plates and encrusting colonies threaded with green tube sponges against deep blue. Image 24 is the same reef top with a large green-teal tube-sponge cluster and white crinoids; the abundant green sponge Anderson's notes single out as absent further south is a recurring element (e.g., Image 9, Image 23, Image 24, Image 32). Image 27 is the most worked-over frame in the set, an overhead of rubble and turf with only scraps of red-brown foliose material.

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Growth-form variety through the middle of the dive. Image 28 is a dense biodiversity close-up — dark maroon plating colony, an orange-spotted encrusting colony, a whitish fine-branched colony, and several sponges in one frame. Image 29 centers a large tan knobbly massive/encrusting mound with gray tube sponges rising beside it. Image 30 is a reef face dominated by red-orange encrusting sponge and coralline rather than coral. Image 31 is a single big yellow-green encrusting sheet colony filling the frame on mauve substrate, and Image 4 does the same with a large flat mauve-gray plate. Image 32 is a high-diversity high-relief frame — teal tube sponges, white-gray branching thickets, yellow-green encrusting colonies, and brown foliose plates together. Image 34 puts a pinkish corymbose Acropora table on a ledge beside a teal-gray massive colony. Image 35 is a wide mid-relief reef top of pale plates, branching colonies, crinoids, and urchins. Image 36 is shot up under a ledge: the smooth underside of a pale massive colony, a yellow-armed crinoid on it, red coralline below, and the long white antennae of a spiny lobster tucked in the crevice.

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The last frames are from the shallows. Image 37 has a diver above a reef top of yellow-green plating colonies, red-brown branching soft corals, and gray tube sponges. Image 38 is a single large flat-topped brown corymbose Acropora table standing clear over rubble. Image 39 is a large pale cream knobbly massive dome filling the frame. Image 40 is a big pinkish-brown thick-branched colony occupying the lower half with a diver above it. Image 41 is an overhead of a broad tan colony studded with conical columnar protrusions — a distinctive form, and Anderson's notes attribute the large shallow areas near 10 m to P. rus and P. rus-like Montipora, which is a field call, not one read off this frame. Image 42 is a dim distant view of gray plating and massive mounds, form only. Image 43 is a reef top of pale laminar plates and a tan encrusting sheet in hazy blue. Image 5 is dense and close — a brown corymbose Acropora field, a pale corymbose colony, red and pink soft corals, a massive dome, and sea whips with a diver at the top edge. Image 45 is a bushy yellow-green branching Acropora colony with a diver above. Image 53 is a cluster of fine-branched pale colonies, which Anderson identified as pocilloporids, with dark red sponge above and a smooth massive colony at lower left; the identification is Anderson's, not a read of the imagery. Image 47 is a yellow-green bushy branching Acropora clump on a maroon coralline base. Image 48 is a sand-and-rubble slope with a stack of gray-white foliose whorls and a mauve corymbose plate, orange anemonefish-type fish present. Image 49 and Image 50 are the signature frames of the shallow reef here: a near-continuous pavement of overlapping gray-mauve laminar and foliose plates with white margins running to the limit of the frame, one maroon-brown plate colony standing out in the middle of it in Image 50, and two yellow-banded anemonefish in Image 49. Image 52 closes the set on a dim wide view of a plate and foliose mound with green algae.

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What the frames support, and what they don't. Across 53 frames the site reads as a high-relief seamount with plating and foliose growth forms dominant at both ends of the depth range, massive domes and meandroid brain corals scattered through, branching and corymbose Acropora concentrated in the shallows, and sponges — especially the green tube sponges — a persistent structural element. Anderson's own notes give the taxonomy and the depth structure: Seriatopora hystrix and Pocillopora acuta throughout, Pachyseris common, highly pigmented plates at depth, high cover and diversity at 15 m and again at 8-9 m.

Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 33% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 54 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 blind Claude pass scored no coral point as bleached or pale.

Stressors

Image 25 is an extensive shingle of thin pale plates layered one over another with a massive dome behind. Image 26 is the single most striking colony of the dive: a hemispherical meandroid brain-coral dome, the upper half deep maroon-red and the lower half pale cream, with an abrupt boundary between the two — described here as a pigmentation contrast only, with no bleaching figure derived or implied.

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Visible compromise in the imagery is limited and local — the turf-and-rubble frame at Image 27 and the pigmentation split on the brain dome in Image 26 — and nothing in the set shows anything like widespread bleaching. A frame not shown here, from the deep slope, shows one partly bleached colony: a plating colony, mottled gray-white with live tissue, paler than the brown plates around it. Older dead patches on the same plate are crusted red. Anderson's note that some Seriatopora hystrix were sickly at 15 m and above is the in-water observation; the frames here do not independently document it. The early-morning low light also means the deep half of the set under-represents color and fine detail relative to the shallow half, so the set is not evenly informative with depth. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.

Fish and other fauna

Image 18 is a fish frame: a large school of small fish over a golden-lit massive dome, consistent with Anderson's "fish biomass at 25-30 m=high-very high" note, though the photographs are not a fish survey. Image 19 is backlit and hazy, fish school over dark foliose colonies.

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The closing run, and the wobbegong. Image 46 looks under a plate ledge encrusted with pink coralline, and a large flattened mottled bottom-resting shark is lying in the shadow beneath it — consistent with the three wobbegongs Anderson's notes record for this dive, a personal record.

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Another under-ledge frame, in which Anderson recorded a wobbegong, shows pink-red soft corals along the overhang and pale nodular colonies below; the animal itself is not clearly resolvable in the photograph (e.g., Image 54).

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Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, seven independent stations recorded station-year means of 25–86% hard coral cover between 2016 and 2025; the nearest, Social Ecological Research Frontiers (SERF) / University of Rhode Island (URI) / Thriving Oceans at Paniki Besar Island, 1.34 km away, read 25% in 2018.

Dive record

Dive 23, "My Reef", 21 October 2018 — a seamount in the Fam Archipelago, entered at 07:02 to a maximum of 33.5 m at 27°C. 53 habitat photographs, no topside frames.