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

General benthic features

The set-piece here is soft coral. One frame shows a diver alongside a bommie the size of a small building, its entire crown upholstered in arborescent soft corals — lilac, mauve, cream, and pale gold Dendronephthya/Scleronephthya-type colonies with polyps fully extended in current — with a shimmering cloud of anthias and glassfish suspended over it. Nothing else in the Saudi set looks like it. The hard coral reef around it is dense and warm-toned: pocilloporids in salmon, rose, apricot, and lilac packed shoulder to shoulder down the slope, tan and gold corymbose Acropora, blue-gray and cream Porites lobes, faviid domes, and a very large table Acropora Anderson captioned "monster Acropora" (e.g., Image 1, Image 2, Image 3, Image 4).

1234

A second table Acropora photographed from above shows a striking two-tone pattern — olive-gold in the center, clean white around the entire outer margin.

Coral cover

Coral cover is 21.0% ± 15.8 across 174 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.

Stressors

The site record reports 18.9% of coral tissue bleached at about 11.9°C-weeks DHW — second-lowest in this Red Sea set behind Reef-I, and the two figures sit close enough to read as one reef system sampled twice.

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 second of the two 3 August 2024 dives off Jeddah with Al-Haddad SCUBA, on the neighboring reef about 500 m north of Reef-I.

Other notes

See condition for how that reads.