Saudi Red Sea - Chicken Wreck (Jeddah)

Setting

A large steel shipwreck off Jeddah, dived three times across August 2024 with Al-Haddad SCUBA and Saudia SCUBA, and one of the sites carrying a per-visit series in the site record. The wreck is substantial: a long hull lying over on a silty seabed, a swept run of deck plating you can swim along, an open lattice of pipework and framing standing clear of the structure, and interior spaces you can look out of (e.g., Image 2, Image 6).

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General benthic features

Coral has settled on all of it but thinly — small pocilloporids, corymbose Acropora, faviids, and encrusting sponges dotted at wide spacing over silt-filmed steel, a scatter rather than a crust (e.g., Image 5).

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Off the wreck, a broad silty-sand slope carries widely spaced small bommies and one or two large brain corals, and a shallower natural reef rises alongside with xeniid pulse corals, red encrusting sponge, and faviid heads (e.g., Image 3, Image 7, Image 9).

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Coral cover

Site-level coral cover is 16.6% ± 16.0 across 251 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 three visits ran 6.2% cover / 20.3% bleaching on 2 August (DHW 11.5, 33°C), 16.3% / 28.0% on 10 August (DHW 14.6, 31°C), and 18.7% / 28.3% on 17 August (DHW 17.2, 33°C) — a threefold spread in cover across fifteen days, which almost certainly reflects which part of a very heterogeneous site was photographed on each dive rather than any real change in the reef.

Stressors

The condition record here is the most specific in the Saudi set: Anderson captioned one frame "disease" and another "dying Favites", and both stand up to inspection.

Comparisons with other data

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

Other notes

See flags.