After a great, albeit exhausting trip, we treated ourselves to one fun dive on the last day. The most lobsters I have ever seen at a single site. coral cover=5%
This shipwreck lies at about 11 m off Mayreau, a short boat ride from the Mayreau Gardens CO2 seep. It is likely the Puruni, a vessel reported to have sunk off Mayreau in 1918 at about 12 m (40 ft), but no nameplate or hull marking was visible in our photographs.
Max. dive depth=11.3 m
Temperature=29.2°C
Coral cover (2019)=4.9±1.5% (mean±standard error)
After a week of fieldwork at the seep, we ended the trip with one recreational dusk dive here on 1 October 2019 (29 minutes). The hull plating and girders are covered mainly by red encrusting sponges and crustose coralline algae, with sea fans and sea rods rising from the structure (photos 1–3). Hard corals are sparse: small encrusting and massive colonies, including a brain coral (photo 6). A blind computer-vision point count of 28 of our photos found no coral in 18 of them (median 0%), as expected on a wreck.
Interesting observations included Caribbean spiny lobsters (Panulirus argus) sheltering in nearly every crevice and opening of the hull, including an adult beside a juvenile (photos 4–5); our page above calls it "the most lobsters I have ever seen at a single site." A school of small reef fish streamed through one of its dark openings. At the nearby seep, our team found that corals persist despite extreme periodic pH fluctuations (Enochs et al. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-020-01927-5).