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 Image 2 and Image 6.

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General benthic features

The hull plating is only thinly colonized, with small colonies and encrusting sponges dotted at wide spacing over silt-filmed steel, while the pipework and framing carry dense, multi-colony growth of branching, tabular, massive, and soft corals (e.g., Image 5, Image 8).

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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

• Reference: Mayfield (2025)
• Data file: (Mayfield, 2025-appendix A)
• CoralNet submission package (accession #5546)
• 17% ± 16% SD across 251 photographs.
• The three visits ran 6.9% cover / 20% bleaching on 2 August (DHW 11.5, 33°C), 17% / 27% on 10 August (DHW 14.6, 31°C), and 19% / 28% on 17 August (DHW 17.2, 33°C) — a nearly 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

Anderson noted disease on one frame: a large pale plating colony with a ring-shaped tissue-loss lesion, a white band of bare skeleton circling a turf-covered center, with living tissue outside the ring (photo not shown). Another frame, of a colony noted as a dying Favites, shows a rounded massive colony whose crown is covered by a fine algal film and reddish encrusting growth (photo not shown). Bleached colonies recur across the site: a white patch inside a pigmented branching thicket (e.g., Image 4), and, in frames not shown, stark-white branching colonies on the pipework and a large stark-white massive colony on the sand beside the hull.

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Comparisons with other data

Apart from our own published survey shown here, we found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. If you would like to share yours, please email us.