Saudi Red Sea - north Rabigh (shore) (Rabigh)

Setting

A shore-entry reef north of Rabigh on the central Saudi Red Sea coast, surveyed 16 August 2024 with Captain Khaled during the 2023-24 Red Sea bleaching event.

General benthic features

Away from the crest, isolated colonies sit on open carbonate sand, and turf-covered rubble separates surviving heads (e.g., Image 4).

4

Coral cover

Published CoralNet point counts put total coral cover here (bleached corals included) at 23.6% with 6% algae, and 64.8% of coral tissue bleached at about 16.9 degree-heating-weeks. That figure is a manual point count from Anderson's own published paper, not a computer vision estimate. Also on record for this site: It carries the provenance of the paper it appears in and is not subject to the CoralSCOP/DINOv3 caveats applied elsewhere on this map. Anderson considers this CoralSCOP and DINOv3 figure a work in progress and will replace it as soon as a better coral-cover CV model turns up.

Stressors

The photographs are a bleaching record first and a habitat record second. The crest is a shallow, wave-washed pavement almost at the surface, and much of the branching framework in the frame is stark bone-white - fully bleached branching and plate colonies standing over darker, still-pigmented massives (e.g., Image 1).

1

Massive colonies tell the same story more slowly: one dome is uniformly lilac-pale with two large patches of freshly exposed skeleton already fouling brown, another green-tinged massive is bleaching in blotches with algal turf creeping into the dead margins (e.g., Image 2, Image 3).

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No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores evident.

Comparisons with other data

No prior survey data from this site. If you would like to share yours, please email us.