Taiwan - Kenting / Nanwan (mainland)

Setting

This is a regional marker covering the Kenting/Nanwan coast at Taiwan's southern tip — the reef system behind Anderson's SHVTS work, which compared Seriatopora hystrix thermal physiology at the cold-upwelling site Houbihu against non-upwelling Houwan up the coast (see coralreefdiagnostics.com/shvts). Visibility in two of the three described frames is plainly limited, consistent with the logs' repeated complaints of murk.

General benthic features

The first shows a robust tan branching Acropora thicket with white branch tips standing at the edge of a pale silt-sand plain, with a school of fifty-plus green chromis hovering over the sand margin, one black-and-white humbug damselfish, and a few darker damsels below — a coral patch abutting soft sediment, exactly the mosaic the logs describe (e.g., Image 1).

1

The second is a natural-light, green-cast wide view of a densely covered slope: stacked scalloped foliose and plating colonies, a large maze-patterned brain coral above them, bushy fine-branching colonies along the right ridge, encrusting growth throughout, and a striped bream-like fish — high living cover in visibly turbid, greenish water (e.g., Image 2).

2

The third looks along a steep, near-vertical face falling into blue: plating and encrusting colonies the whole way down, small massive heads, shadowed crevices, and several large feather stars on the near wall, matching a 2008 log entry that reads simply "murky, many crinoids" (e.g., Image 3).

3

Coral cover

• No coral-cover value of its own is published here; nothing is estimated from these photographs.

Stressors

Image 6, filed by Anderson as 'bleaching', shows a large massive coral white over most of its upper surface with pigmented patches below, which is partial bleaching; the photograph is undated within the 2008-2010 dives.

6

No disease, predation or man-made object is resolvable in the frames described, and the green-blue color cast makes finer pigment calls unsafe.

Comparisons with other data

Tkachenko et al. (2007) and Dang et al. (2020) surveyed this site (Nanwan). Within 5 km, 22 independent stations recorded station-year means of 2.3–49% hard coral cover between 2003 and 2025; the nearest, XL Catlin Seaview Survey at transect 42011, 0.66 km away, read 15–18% between 2016 and 2018.

Dive record

Anderson's own 2008-2011 University of Hawaii, UCSB, and dive-computer logs carry more than fifty dives here, from 3.7 to 33.5 m: repeated Seriatopora, Pocillopora damicornis, and Stylophora pistillata collections, settlement-tile and underwater-platform work, a coral-spawning night dive, water and sediment transects, a dive on a Greek wreck, and dives in the power-plant thermal outlet at roughly 30°C and near a sewage outfall where coral was overgrown by algae.

Other notes

Thirteen photographs are attached to this site, from Anderson's website and a general Nanwan picture collection rather than a dive-by-dive set; only the first three are described in words.