Saudi Red Sea - Rose Reef (Thuwal)

Setting

A small circular reef whose outer face is a near-vertical wall below about 15 m. Several dives ran to 32–36 m and the frames show why: a near-vertical limestone face plastered with small colonies from the surface down, dropping past a fish-swarmed mid-water zone onto a flat, low-relief rubble and sand floor (e.g., Image 2, Image 8).

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General benthic features

Viewed from 35 m, that floor is gray-blue, low, almost entirely coralline-crusted rubble with scattered small massives and nothing upright. The wall itself carries a fine-grained mosaic: encrusting and submassive faviids, small pocilloporids, tan and orange encrusting sheets, foliose plates with clean white growing margins, delicate gray and lilac soft corals with extended polyps, sponges and crustose coralline in pinks and reds, and black wire corals springing off the lip into open water (e.g., Image 5, Image 7, Image 9, Image 11).

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The shallows are a different reef — a wave-washed flat with tabulate and corymbose Acropora right under the surface, and it is there, in the September and November 2023 frames, that the bleaching in the published record is unmistakable in the photographs.

Coral cover

• Reference: Mayfield (2025)
• Data file: (Mayfield, 2025-appendix A)
• CoralNet submission package (accession #5546)
• 14% ± 14% (mean ± SD) across 720 photographs.

Stressors

Anderson's 2024 logs record a second bleaching event here: "despite mean temperatures, bleaching was severe" (28 September 2024), "severe bleaching, albeit less >25 m" (4 October 2024, the dive behind the paper's 62% figure), and "extensive coral mortality due to bleaching" (9 November 2024). On the shallow flat in February 2024, the white patches are a mix of crustose coralline algae and old framework and recent mortality of undetermined cause (photos not shown).

Fish and other fauna

Red soldierfish shelter in its crevices, and dense chromis and fusilier schools work the blue (e.g., Image 3, Image 6).

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Anderson's frames also show a large barracuda school (11 November 2023) (e.g., Image 20), giant clams (e.g., Image 18, Image 21), and moray eels (e.g., Image 22, Image 23), and the 29 November 2024 log records a large silvertip or possibly tiger shark.

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Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, two independent stations recorded station-year means of 28–39% hard coral cover in 2015; the nearest, Monroe et al. (2018) at Offshore reef 1, 4.99 km away, read 28% in 2015.

Dive record

Ten dives on eight dates between September 2023 and November 2024 with Coastline (KAUST): one in September 2023, two on 11 November and one on 17 November 2023, one in February 2024, two on 28 September 2024, and one each on 4 October, 9 November, and 29 November 2024.