Triton Bay - Larry Dive Heaven

Setting

Thermocline at 13-14 m. Reef leveled out at 5 m (hard to find shallower).

General benthic features

15-m: relatively barren for a long stretch before hitting soft-coral dominated reef. Tubastrea colonies common throughout site (mostly green). At 16-19 m, soft coral+Tubastrea environment. Plentiful barrel sponges. Bubble coral. Hard corals relatively uncommon at 20 m. Large areas with long-dead coral covered by coralline algae. Some fungids (though rare on trip so far). Above 14 m, stony corals begin to become more common. Brain corals common at 8-9 m. Unknown plating coral species (unfortunately no picture due to fogging), sheeting coral (unknown species). Acropora started to become common shallower than 7 m. 6-7 m: hard coral community improved significantly, thermocline at 6m (1-2C warmer). At 5-6 m some large Porites sp. bommies covered with tunicates (the common one seen in the Banda Sea=golden tunicate), fish biomass in shallows=high. First site where Pocillopora verrucosa was common, though only above 5 m (particularly at 4-5 m). Soft corals prevalent at all depths.

Coral cover

Coral cover — DINOv3 point classifier. The DINOv3 point classifier returned 17.1% for this site. A CoralSCOP cross-check is not in the consolidated table, so there is no second estimate here. Both models have known weaknesses, and they are different weaknesses. CoralSCOP computer vision reads HIGH on low-cover reefs: across twelve sites with a Reef Check diver survey within 1 km, the median CoralSCOP figure is 1.68x the survey value and the worst case is 4.6x. The DINOv3 point classifier is strong on reefs resembling its training data (6-class macro-F1 0.62, hard coral recall 0.82) but degrades badly on an unseen reef - cross-domain point accuracy measured at 0.17-0.25, ceiling near 35-50%. Expect this CoralSCOP and DINOv3 figure to change: Anderson is actively hunting for a more accurate coral-cover model and will rerun it when he finds one.

Fish and other fauna

First octopus. Saw a second shortly afterwards. “Patrick”-like sea stars. Beautiful scorpionfish, 5 green+black nudibranchs (never before seen, but common at site). Small, blue/yellow ribbon eels (x 2)=beautiful. Black banded sea snake (first of trip). Monster sea cucumber (common), several huge, purple-brown Acropora colonies (never before seen) @ 7-8 m. Large, awesome anemones with clownfish common throughout site. In general, sea anemone cover was very high. Massive bumphead parrotfish at several places along site. Highlights: nudibranchs, turtle, sea snake (1st of trip)

Comparisons with other data

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

Dive record

Dive 5: “Larry Dive Heaven:” 10 m viz @ 27C.

Other notes

Camera fogged up almost instantly. Highlights: nudibranchs, turtle, sea snake (1st of trip) No coral-cover figure is published for this site: after diver-portrait and topside frames were excluded, only 3 usable benthic frames remain, too few for a reliable estimate. An earlier CoralSCOP pass over the same diver-contaminated 7-image set had suggested roughly 13%, and a DINOv3 pass suggested 17.1%, but both rested on that insufficient, contaminated set and have been withdrawn.