Saudi Red Sea - Coral Gardens (Jeddah)

General benthic features

The reef is built on giants. Its defining structures are enormous knobby and columnar Porites mounds — one frame is filled edge to edge by a single colony several meters across and several meters tall, standing free on sand with anthias streaming past — and tall pinnacles that rise almost to the surface, their flanks holding clouds of small fish (e.g., Image 5, Image 6).

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Between and over them sit corymbose and staghorn Acropora in tan and gold, dusty-rose and salmon pocilloporids, green foliose plates, small domed massives, and encrusting plates (e.g., Image 1, Image 8, Image 9); giant clams (e.g., Image 21, Image 22) and a blue-spotted ribbontail ray (Image 23) sit in the pavement.

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Coral cover

• Reference: Mayfield (2025)
• Data file: (Mayfield, 2025-appendix A)
• CoralNet submission package (accession #5546)
• 28% ± 18% SD across 300 photographs.
• The site record carries the two visits separately: 29% cover with 41% of coral tissue bleached on 10 August (DHW 14.6, 32°C) and 27% with 45% bleached on 17 August (DHW 17.2, 33°C), the second labeled as at the height of the 2024 bleaching event.
• Cover held; the bleached fraction climbed as the heat accumulated.

Stressors

Nearly all of the big Porites mounds are pale (e.g., Image 7), and one large massive colony carries old partial mortality: its upper surface is gray, turf-covered dead skeleton above a basal band of living brown tissue (e.g., Image 3).

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Anderson's field notes for these dives, which record paling Porites, mild bleaching, struggling corals, and a bleached Pocillopora verrucosa, describe exactly what the frames show.

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.

Dive record

Two dives a week apart in August 2024 with Al-Haddad SCUBA, on a Jeddah reef that lives up to its name.