Manafaru House Reef

There are many cracks and burrows with lionfish, moray eels, shrimps, lobsters, stonefish and scorpionfish. Swimming away, a cloud of hundreds of batfish appears, and the site has a resident green turtle and nurse sharks.

In the lagoon, coral blocks gather surgeonfish, parrotfish and hunting jacks. There are schools of snappers, sometimes barracudas, and stingrays on the sandy bottom. Octopus, ghost pipefish and flounders are good subjects for photography.

In 2010, the Manafaru reef had very little coral cover and had still not recovered from the 1998 bleaching, being mostly dead 12 years later. Because it lies in the northernmost atoll, the island is subject to high winds and warming waters, which may explain the low coral survival. A 2010 project planned to install coral propagation frames near the water villas and, sparsely, on the house reef, starting with 136 frames of 1 m². In Haa Alifu, the sea usually calms down at the start of December and stays that way until May, before the monsoon.