Saudi Red Sea - Drogon Corals (Jeddah)
Part of the regional summaries: Saudi Arabia - Jeddah / KAUST (Thuwal) / Rabigh, Saudi Arabia, and Red Sea
More info
Al Madinah and Makkah (NOAA CRW virtual station)Drogon Corals mixes a densely rugose, coral-dense shallow flat with a wide bare sand plain of isolated bommies — the sand plain is what pulls this site's cover down into the low teens despite a visibly dense crest. A large fluted giant clam was photographed, and the published record puts 25% of coral tissue bleached at the time of this August 2024 dive, visible as white-capped massive colonies beside brown, pigmented neighbors on the sand-plain bommies.
تمزج مرجانيات دروغون بين مسطح ضحل كثيف الخشونة مكتظ بالمرجان وسهل رملي عارٍ واسع من كتل معزولة — والسهل الرملي هو ما يخفض تغطية هذا الموقع إلى ما يزيد قليلًا على العُشر رغم قمة كثيفة بوضوح. وصُوِّر محار عملاق مضلع كبير، ويضع السجل المنشور نسبة ابيضاض نسيج المرجان عند 25% وقت هذه الغطسة في أغسطس 2024، ويظهر ذلك في مستعمرات كتلية بيضاء القمم بجانب جيران بنية مصطبغة على كتل السهل الرملي.
ترجمة هذا الملخص بالذكاء الاصطناعي؛ النص الإنجليزي هو المعتمد.
7 of the 44 photographs on this page are shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.
Site description
General benthic features
The site has three distinct zones and the frames move between them. A shallow reef flat sits a meter or two under a mirror-calm surface: dark, densely rugose framework with pocilloporids, small Acropora, and encrusting growth packed over it, photographed against the underside of the water (e.g., Image 1, Image 2).
A wide white sand plain below it carries widely spaced, isolated coral bommies with tens of meters of open sand between them — those frames are close to empty, and they are what pulls a site with a dense-looking crest down into the low teens (e.g., Image 3).
And a reef face drops from the flat into deep blue, hung with tan and mustard corymbose Acropora, pocilloporids, and encrusting Millepora-type plates (e.g., Image 4).
Coral cover
- Reference: Mayfield (2025)
- Data file: (Mayfield, 2025-appendix A)
- CoralNet submission package (accession #5546)
- 14% ± 12% SD across the 67 photographs annotated for the paper.
Stressors
The published record puts 25% of coral tissue bleached on this dive, and the sand-plain bommies show it: small knobby and lobed massive colonies with white to pale blue-white tops sit beside dark brown, pigmented colonies in the same frames (e.g., Image 15, Image 25).
Fish and other fauna
The dive's photographs include a large fluted giant clam set on sand, its dark olive-green mantle finely speckled and its scalloped shell margins rimmed pink and magenta by encrusting coralline algae, with a skirt of xeniid pulse corals around it (e.g., Image 51).
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
A single dive on 2 August 2024 with Saudia SCUBA, the first of a Jeddah day that continued to Chicken Wreck.
CV model comparison
More info
The reference is this dive site's own published CoralNet point count by the author (Mayfield 2025, Environments 12:248, Appendix A; most frames annotated by CoralNet's AI, trained and checked by the author). The computer-vision rows are this site's own values: Claude is a blind point count of all of the site's edited photographs, DINOv3 ran on the site's benchmark frames (the photographs the author annotated point by point), and CoralSCOP is the site's finished survey of its edited photographs. They are on different frame sets from the published count, a row under 30 frames is indicative only, and no computer-vision method yet estimates coral cover accurately on new images.| Method | Hard coral cover (%) | Photos (n) ± SE |
|---|---|---|
| Published point count (CoralNet-assisted) | 13.9 | |
| In-house DINOv3 | too few photos (n=1) | |
| CoralSCOP edited | 21.6 | n = 66 |
| Claude (edited photos) | 10.2 | n = 65 · SE 1.6 |
The two computer-vision methods disagree by 11.4 pp (10.2–21.6%) and read on both sides of the published point count (13.9%); the headline is the published point count because it is the site's published value (CoralNet-assisted: most frames were annotated by CoralNet's AI, trained and checked by the author).
In-house DINOv3: this method was run on 1 of 67 photos, under the 10 needed for a value, so it is not shown and is left out of any mean; every other row rests on its own photo count.
See a more detailed, stand-alone version of this table.
Data & links
All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics. Data are from Coral Reef Diagnostics.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.