Saudi Red Sea - Um Mankout (Yanbu)

General benthic features

This is a structurally rich reef. The frames show something closer to a continuous coral carpet than most of the Thuwal sites: a slope blanketed in knobby, columnar, and lobate Porites growing colony against colony, over hundreds of square meters, with almost no bare pavement between them — a genuine Porites-dominated framework rather than isolated bommies (e.g., Image 1, Image 4).

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The reef top adds the color: emerald-green branching thickets, cobalt and powder-blue digitate Acropora, lavender, dusty-rose, and magenta pocilloporids, tan corymbose Acropora, cream Millepora-type fire coral, and khaki faviid domes, packed tightly together (e.g., Image 2, Image 3).

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A large tan-and-cream foliose/plating colony (Turbinaria- or Pachyseris-type) forms a broad shelf in one frame. Down on the sand the picture is quieter — a moon wrasse (Thalassoma lunare) working a bare patch beside a discarded corroded metal object and a dead shell, one of the few pieces of marine debris photographed on any of these Yanbu dives.

Coral cover

Coral cover is 26.4% ± 17.5 across 228 photographs, quoted verbatim from Mayfield, A.B. (2025) Environments 12:248 — Red Sea 2023-24 bleaching; CoralNet point annotation, Appendix A — a manual, diver-annotated CoralNet point count from Anderson's own published work, not a computer vision output and not recomputed here. The site record's prose gives the 15 September visit as 26% cover with 27.9% of coral tissue bleached at roughly 14.8°C-weeks DHW; the numeric fields carry 26.4% and 28.0%.

Stressors

Condition: this dive fell inside the late-summer 2023 thermal-stress event, and the paler colonies in the frames are consistent with that.

Comparisons with other data

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

Dive record

An offshore Yanbu reef dived twice on 15 September 2023 with Umluj Dive Center, to 27 m on the dawn dive and 23 m on the second — the second folder is labeled "Um Mankout crack", for a fissure feature in the reef.

Other notes

See flags.