The author of this video thought they were just filming the beautiful motion of a manta ray swimming, gliding through Indonesian waters. But what we see in this video is an incredible tour of Bali where coral cover is pretty substantial but the hard bottom doesn’t exactly seem to be reefal in nature. That is, there are corals everywhere but you might not call this a coral reef.
This could be due to the depth at which these divers are filming to swim with the manta rays, perhaps a little shallower than the mesophotic zone where photosynthetic corals still grow but don’t abound. Regardless, the swooping flyovers of the interesting marine habitat offer up some great views of large, mature soft and stony coral colonies as well as a great cross section of not-so-shallow reef fish species.
