Saudi Red Sea - Alrass Alakhdar (Yanbu)

General benthic features

The reef is a shallow-to-mid fringing structure that runs from a wave-lit reef flat a meter or two under the surface down a face onto deeper bommies and pinnacles. The flat is a tightly packed mosaic of knobby and columnar Porites, corymbose and digitate Acropora, and pocilloporids in the vivid magenta, hot-pink, and lilac color forms the northern Red Sea is known for, over a base of coralline-crusted rock (e.g., Image 1, Image 2, Image 3).

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Deeper, the same Porites-and-Acropora framework continues onto isolated pinnacles standing in blue water, with butterflyfish, sergeant majors, and anthias working around them.

Coral cover

Coral cover is 29.6% ± 15.3 across 59 photographs — the highest published cover value of any site in this Red Sea set — quoted verbatim from Mayfield, A.B. (2025) Environments 12:248 — Red Sea 2023-24 bleaching; CoralNet point annotation, Appendix A, a manual, diver-annotated CoralNet point count from Anderson's own published work, not a computer vision output and not recomputed here.

Stressors

It is also the site with the highest published bleaching figure of the 2023 Yanbu leg: 58.5% of coral tissue at roughly 14.9°C-weeks DHW. Those two numbers belong together — this was a densely coral-covered reef that was, on the day it was photographed, more than half bleached. The bleaching is the story of this dive, and it is the clearest single-frame evidence anywhere in the 2023 Saudi series (e.g., Image 4).

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Comparisons with other data

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

Dive record

One morning dive to 28 m on 16 September 2023 with Umluj Dive Center, on the second day of the Yanbu leg.

Other notes

See flags.