There’s not too many places in the world where corals are so abundant and diverse that they form a veritable Jungle of living corals. Sure, many places have exceptional living coral reefs where the shallows are approaching 90 to 100% coral cover, but few can compare with the dense, lush growth of live corals of Raja Ampat.
If you’re at all into corals and coral reefs, then you’ve surely heard of the Coral Triangle. And if you are at all familiar with the Coral Triangle, then perhaps you’ve heard of its crowning jewel, Raja Ampat and the surrounding Bird’s Head Seascape. In the span of just nine months, last year Reef Builders travelled to each corner of the Coral Triangle, Solomon Islands, Bali, Philippines, and capped off the tour with some epic diving in Raja Ampat.
The hype and the allure of Raja Ampat is well warranted, with the epicenter of the Coral Triangle being absolutely endowed with huge populations of both live corals and bountiful reef fish. In fact, sometimes the schools of fish were so dense while diving that they obscured the reefs we were trying to observe, and this applied to all size of reef fish species from the tiniest sweepers and cardinalfish, to anthias, snappers and more.
We do our best to bring back and document as much of the corals and fish from the reefs we visit. But however many pictures or videos we record, these are the tiniest samples of natural living masterpieces which are sadly, disappearing at an alarming rate due to a variety of stressors. With that in mind, we made this video during our last shallow dive in Raja Ampat to focus on the living side of corals reefs, and celebrate them in their current natural glory.
It is our hope that this clip will put you in our shoes (or dive fins) for a few minutes of this dive so you can see just how luscious a living coral reef can be. Check out the gallery of reef scenes from Raja Ampat below which are all in very high quality, large resolution, and totally suitable as desktop backgrounds.
