Turks and Caicos - Eel Garden

Setting

Eel Garden sits on the shallow Northwest Point shelf off Providenciales. Two frames look down a near-vertical undercut face (e.g., Image 21, Image 34).

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Visibility was excellent under open sun.

General benthic features

Frame by frame it reads as low-relief pavement, not wall: wide shots show a flat-topped ridge of coralline- and turf-crusted limestone, small scattered heads, open sand, and rubble between them, and much dead, algal-filmed rock on the reef top (e.g., Image 1, Image 3).

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Every coral photographed was massive, plating, or encrusting; no branching acroporid appeared. Recurring subjects were sheet-like plating Orbicella up to a meter across, domed and columnar Montastraea cavernosa with large, widely spaced corallites (one head with orange-red tissue, another a thin plate), dinner-plate Agaricia, small mustard-colored Porites astreoides mounds, a meandroid brain coral of the Colpophyllia/Pseudodiploria type, and one solitary disc coral consistent with Scolymia (e.g., Image 5, Image 9, Image 11, Image 15, Image 25).

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Dictyota-type macroalgae and Halimeda filled the interstices, with coralline algae and vivid red encrusting sponge on the pavement; steeper ground held azure vase and yellow tube sponges, red rope sponge, and gorgonians (e.g., Image 7, Image 18).

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Coral cover

• Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
• Coral cover: 20% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 21 of Anderson's photographs (12 edited and 9 unedited originals, because edited versions of most of one dive's photos do not exist; the mean of the two dives' means; 20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.

Stressors

Condition is the story. Ten frames were shot as disease documentation and all show one lesion type: a sharp white band of freshly bared skeleton advancing across pigmented Orbicella and Montastraea tissue, the skeleton behind the front already filmed in turf and sediment (e.g., Image 6, Image 19, Image 20).

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Several colonies had lost roughly a third to two-thirds of their tissue (e.g., Image 4, Image 10).

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A separate colony was half stark white with polyp structure intact - bleached, not dead (e.g., Image 24).

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The frames establish an active tissue-loss front but cannot settle the agent. No corallivores evident.

Fish and other fauna

Fauna was thin: Caribbean reef sharks (Carcharhinus perezi) in four blue-water frames - one banking over a sand chute between coral heads, one cruising a broad rubble-and-pavement flat in hazier water - plus midwater creole-wrasse- and chromis-type fish and one parrotfish (e.g., Image 12, Image 27, Image 29).

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No garden eels appear in any reviewed frame.

Comparisons with other data

Eel Garden (Northwest Point / Columbus Landfall Marine Park, Providenciales) was dived from the Turks & Caicos Explorer II liveaboard on 31 July 2022 (dives 1-2).

Dive record

Two dives on 2022-07-31 (09:09, 11:18; max 27.4 m, mean 15.5 m, 28.3 C) produced a set weighted toward coral condition over scenery.