Saba - Man-of-War Shoals

Setting

This is the high-relief site of the set: basalt spires and pinnacles with narrow clefts and canyons between them, near-vertical walls dropping to pale sand and loose rubble aprons, and shallower crests that catch full sunlight (e.g., Image 16, Image 17, Image 25).

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General benthic features

Cover is overwhelmingly sponge and crustose coralline algae over dead framework (e.g., Image 8).

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Giant barrel sponges (Xestospongia muta) appear in dozens of frames - brick-red, salmon, and tan, several a meter across, one cluster of five or six grown together on the crest, several with torn or pale rims (e.g., Image 2, Image 11, Image 30).

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Golden tube sponges (Aplysina fistularis) form large stands on the shallow crests and orange elephant-ear sponges (Agelas clathrodes) punctuate the wall faces, with olive-mustard encrusting sheets, mint-turquoise sponges, dark red foliose sponges, gray and lavender vase sponges, and abundant scarlet encrusting sponge (e.g., Image 13, Image 14, Image 40, Image 44).

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Gorgonians include sea plumes, sea rods, black bushy colonies, and black-coral bushes silhouetted on the wall; green bushy macroalgae carpets parts of the wall and crest (e.g., Image 10, Image 15, Image 31, Image 38).

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Stony coral is present but subordinate. Great star coral (Montastraea cavernosa) gives the best colonies - several healthy domes with raised corallites, one with a turf-colonized dead patch (e.g., Image 22, Image 33).

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Grooved brain coral (Diploria labyrinthiformis) recurs as olive-green heads, in one frame a live colony sitting beside a dead turf-covered brain skeleton, several with small white lesions (e.g., Image 53, Image 54).

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Plating star corals of the Orbicella type appear as crowded-corallite plates, one being overgrown by a sponge (e.g., Image 3, Image 27, Image 39).

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Agaricia plates, Porites astreoides knobs, a small branching coral stand, and green-striped corallimorphs (Discosoma) fill the cryptic spaces (e.g., Image 47).

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Coral cover

Coral cover: 3.7% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 102 of Anderson's unedited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table. Frames were screened before scoring: open sand, mid-water, blown-out, and burst-duplicate frames, dive computers, topside, and diver shots, blue-light fluorescence, and macros were all removed.

Fish and other fauna

Fauna is the strongest of the four dives: Caribbean reef sharks (Carcharhinus perezi) in four frames, two together on the wall; a small nurse shark under an overhang; a green turtle on the crest across three frames; a queen angelfish inside a barrel sponge; grunt and margate schools; heavy sergeant-major, blue tang, black durgon, creole wrasse, and chromis presence; a rock beauty, a grouper, a trumpetfish, a bearded fireworm, and crinoids (e.g., Image 18, Image 34, Image 48, Image 52).

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One invasive lionfish (Pterois volitans).

Comparisons with other data

No independent survey was made at this exact site; the nearest ones are listed in the table below.

Dive record

Man-of-War Shoals, Saba National Marine Park, reviewed frame by frame from all 109 unedited stills of dive 2, 21 Feb 2026.