Raja Ampat - Two Tree Island

Setting

Anderson's topside frames (not shown in the reef gallery) earn the name: a small, isolated limestone islet, undercut into a deep black notch at the waterline, its jagged karst crown carrying a handful of trees — two of them standing out as spreading, flat-topped crowns above the scrub. From the mother boat, a scatter of similar forested karst islets is visible across an open, calm sea. Divers are shown kitting up on a tender running out to the rock. Underwater this is a wall-and-pinnacle site, not a reef flat. Visibility was good but the water carried heavy plankton and baitfish, and light fell off quickly on the wall, which — together with the trevally and the schooling behavior — points to real current. Several frames look down a vertical face into deep blue, consistent with a wall dive well past 25 m; the logged maximum was 27.6 m.

General benthic features

The benthos divides into two zones. The vertical wall and its overhangs are dominated not by stony coral but by bushy antipatharians — big white, pale-green, and rust-brown black-coral trees standing a meter or more off the rock, in some frames forming a near-continuous fringe down the drop-off — together with large gorgonian sea fans in cream, pink, lilac, and deep red; red and brown encrusting sponges pierced with oscula; orange and yellow sponge crusts; tunicates; crinoids; and rock heavily crusted in pink and mauve coralline algae (e.g., Image 3).

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Stony coral on the wall itself is sparse and mostly foliose: dark chocolate-brown plating colonies with vivid white living rims, consistent with Pachyseris, sitting as isolated discs on coralline pavement; a yellow-green foliose coral; and a well-lit bubble coral, Plerogyra sinuosa, in one shallow frame (e.g., Image 20, Image 31).

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The reef top and shoulder are much denser in hard coral: tabulate corals including several large, clean, healthy plates; shingled plate and foliose colonies; brain corals with fine meandering valleys; smooth pale gray-green encrusting sheets; and low massive domes, interspersed with cream and lilac leather soft corals and pulsing-polyp carpets (e.g., Image 5).

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Even here, though, a large share of the surface is bare pink-red coralline pavement and turf-covered rock rather than living coral — one wide frame shows a broad slab of the shoulder that is almost entirely crustose coralline algae and fine turf, with only white sponges and scattered small colonies on it (e.g., Image 60).

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Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 7.2% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 77 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 front, no crown-of-thorns, and no anchor or blast damage were seen. One small table colony on the reef shoulder is conspicuously white against healthy neighbors, cause not determined; two large foliose plates carry eroded patches in their centers. The extensive coralline-and-turf pavement is normal for a current-scoured, high-energy pinnacle and should not by itself be read as degradation.

Fish and other fauna

The dominant impression across the photographs is water rather than substrate: frame after frame is filled with baitfish. Enormous, dense schools of silversides or anchovies wrap the rock in shimmering curtains dozens of meters across, and a diver flies through the middle of one (e.g., Image 2, Image 16).

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Working the edges of those schools are heavy shoals of fusiliers (blue-and-yellow-tailed), a passing school of streamlined silver mackerel- or small-tuna-shaped fish, at least one giant trevally hunting through, and dense red clouds of anthias closer to the rock. Two frames show a large humphead wrasse (compatible with Cheilinus undulatus) hanging against the wall among the fusiliers (e.g., Image 63, Image 64); another two show a single large heavy-bodied fish at distance that is most consistent with a humphead wrasse as well (e.g., Image 41, Image 42).

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Batfish, sergeant majors, surgeonfish, a filefish, moorish idols, and a boxy pufferfish appear on the reef itself, and dark shoals of glassfish pack the gullies between rocks. The single most striking piece of natural history in the photographs is a sea turtle photographed at rest on a ledge in a run of about ten frames, with divers approaching to within a couple of meters (e.g., Image 34, Image 36, Image 37, Image 39).

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Its carapace is a deep red-brown carrying several conspicuous pale pink patches, and the head tapers to a narrow beak; that combination is most consistent with a hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata), but the species cannot be confirmed from the frame (e.g., Image 37). Other fauna: a small cleaner shrimp with very long white antennae on open rock, a small dark moray or blenny in a hole, and in two frames a jet-black, thick-lobed animal with a reticulate polygonal surface pattern sitting on coralline rubble that could not be confidently identified (e.g., Image 21, Image 22).

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Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, three independent stations recorded 21–69% hard coral cover between 2019 and 2020. The nearest, station 4306 (2.65 km away), read 64% in 2020 in a survey submitted to MERMAID by Maulana N and Wunanto A (Reef Health Data - WP), an individual submission best read as indicative; the two Yenkafal stations (3.45 and 4.22 km away) were surveyed in 2019 by Social Ecological Research Frontiers (SERF), the University of Rhode Island (URI), and Thriving Oceans, and read 69% (east) and 21% (west).

Regional context, not a survey of this site: Razak et al. (2026) found no significant trend in hard coral cover at Misool (a rise of 0.2% per year at eight sites, surveyed by point-intercept transect at about 8–10 m in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2015 by Yayasan Konservasi Alam Nusantara); this is a trend for that location, not this site’s cover.

Dive record

Two Tree Island, dived on 20 October 2018 at 13:15 (62 minutes, 27.6 m maximum; dive log).