Saudi Red Sea - Anderson's Reef-I (Jeddah)

General benthic features

The reef is a set of tall coral pinnacles and buttressed ridges rising from sand into blue water, and the frames read genuinely well-built (e.g., Image 1).

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Lavender, dusty-rose, and pale-blue pocilloporids cover the pinnacle flanks nearly wall-to-wall; large corymbose and staghorn Acropora stands sit on the shoulders in warm tan and cream with clean white growing tips; golden-brown Millepora-type fire coral fans off the crest against open blue; smooth blue-gray Porites lobes, big gray-green faviid domes, and encrusting Montipora-type sheets fill the gaps; and cream and khaki soft corals with polyps extended soften the edges (e.g., Image 2, Image 3, Image 4).

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A fluted giant clam (Tridacna squamosa) with an olive-green mantle sits recessed into the pavement between pale-blue Acropora colonies.

Coral cover

Coral cover is 22.7% ± 15.1 across 146 photographs, 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. The site record's prose gives the visit as 23% cover with 17.2% of coral tissue bleached at about 11.9°C-weeks DHW — the lowest bleaching figure of any site in this Red Sea set, recorded in the same month and the same city as Bhadur Reef's 62% and Shark Reef's 72%.

Fish and other fauna

Red anthias hang over the crest in clouds.

Comparisons with other data

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

Dive record

The first of the two 3 August 2024 dives off Jeddah with Al-Haddad SCUBA, on the pair of reefs that carry Anderson's name on this map.