Saba - Tent Shallow
Part of the regional summary: Saba
More about this place: Saba on Wikipedia
More info
Leeward Caribbean Islands (NOAA CRW virtual station)A volcanic sand plain with a large garden-eel colony, broken by isolated rocky knolls covered mainly in tube and barrel sponges, sea rods, and sea fans. Hard coral is only a minor part of this sand-and-soft-coral habitat, and an invasive lionfish was spotted on one outcrop.
Een vulkanische zandvlakte met een grote kolonie lintalen, onderbroken door losse rotsheuveltjes die vooral begroeid zijn met buis- en tonsponzen, zeestaven en zeewaaiers. Hard koraal vormt maar een klein deel van dit leefgebied van zand en zachte koralen, en op een van de rotsen werd een invasieve koraalduivel gezien.
AI translation of this summary; the English is authoritative.
Three other CRD dive sites with their own pages within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.
These are unedited originals; edited versions will replace them.
This page shows 50 of the 90 photographs from this site, including every one the text cites.
11 of the 50 photographs on this page are shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.
Site description
Setting
A volcanic sand-and-rock habitat rather than a continuous reef; the dive logged a maximum of 29.6 m (one frame, not shown, has the dive computer at 5.6 m during the safety stop).
General benthic features
Rocky outcrops rising from the sand are thickly colonized by sponges and turf rather than by hard coral: dense clusters of mustard-yellow tube sponges, orange and salmon encrusting/barrel sponges (one large pair flanking a school of reef fish and a striped fish sheltering in a barrel-sponge mouth), pale blue-gray vase sponges, and a black bushy growth consistent with black coral (e.g., Image 5, Image 8, Image 9, Image 18, Image 27).
Hard coral is present but a minor component: one small honeycomb/star-coral head (tan, evenly pored, healthy) sits beside an orange sponge cluster; a separate frame shows two adjacent grooved brain/star corals (dark, ridged) flanked by orange tube sponges and a mustard hill-type coral fragment; and a low mounding brain coral appears at the base of a rock covered in black sea rods and a purple sea fan (e.g., Image 12, Image 22, Image 24).
Coral cover
- Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
- Coral cover: 3.0% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 85 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.
Stressors
The photo review saw no bleaching, disease, or physical damage on the small number of coral colonies photographed, although a computer-vision point count called 2.3% of coral points bleached (1 of 85 photos); the habitat's low hard coral component is a feature of the site type (sand/rubble with sponge-colonized outcrops), not a health signal. No corallivores were evident.
Fish and other fauna
The opening and closing frames show a large garden-eel colony: a dense field of pale eels with heads raised from burrows across an open gray sand plain, visible in two separate wide shots (e.g., Image 7, Image 33).
A lionfish (invasive, Pterois volitans/miles) is visible tucked into a crevice on one outcrop, camouflaged against the gray rock. Reef fish (blue and brown chromis, a parrotfish, sergeant majors) move over the structure, and one frame shows a diver examining a barrel-sponge-and-coral outcrop in clear blue water (e.g., Image 8, Image 49).
Comparisons with other data
Klomp & Kooistra (2003) and Noble et al. (2013) surveyed this site (Tent Reef).
CV model comparison
More info
A few colony-focused photos raise the mean; the median is the typical photo. No computer-vision method yet estimates coral cover accurately on new images, so treat this as indicative rather than a measurement; it is revised as the methods improve.More info
DINOv3 and CoralSCOP were run on the site's photographs (see each row's n) and are listed for comparison. No diver transect exists for this trip, so agreement between the rows is not accuracy, and no computer-vision method yet estimates coral cover accurately on new images; treat every row as indicative.| Method | Hard coral cover (%) | Photos (n) ± SE |
|---|---|---|
| In-house DINOv3 | 15.0 | n = 85 · SE 0.6 |
| CoralSCOP unedited | 21.3 | n = 72 · SE 1.8 |
| Claude | 3.0 | n = 85 · SE 0.6 |
The two computer-vision methods agree within 6.3 pp (15.0–21.3%) and read 12.0–18.3 pp above Claude's blind point count (3.0%); the headline is Claude's blind point count because no transect or manual count exists here.
See a more detailed, stand-alone version of this table.
Data & links
All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics. Data are from Coral Reef Diagnostics.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.
References
- Klomp KD, Kooistra DJ (2003). A post-hurricane, rapid assessment of reefs in the windward Netherlands Antilles (stony corals, algae and fishes). Atoll Research Bulletin 496:404-437. DOI
- Noble MM, van Laake G, Berumen ML, Fulton CJ (2013). Community change within a Caribbean coral reef marine protected area following two decades of local management. PLOS ONE 8:e54069. DOI