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Red Beach or Pantai Merah

Red Beach or Pantai Merah is a main station and old dragon feeding are located. Pantai Merah extend from surface down to 20 plus meters and is richly adorned in all manner of colorful sea life. Pantai Merah represents a trantition between tropical and temperate water habitats, north and south, and with fabulous fish and corals is a good introduction to Komodo.

Snorkelling here is excellent over a healthy shallow reef. Diving is at the sloping reef edge where the bottom drops down to 25 metres. Half way along the beach front is the best spot, where the reef slope gives way to a more abrupt wall with lots of green branching cup corals and stinging hydroids.

Thousands of fish of every colour and shape are here including yellow damsels, regal angelfish, checkerboard wrasse, masked unicornfish and schooling reef fish such as striped fusiliers, against a beautiful backdrop of acripora corals, gorgonian fans and sponges. Frogfish also hang around the wall, blending in colourfully with their host sponge and surrounds.

Mantis shrimps are always in attendance with their housekeeping as they remove rock from their burrows. Their darting bulbous eyes are thought to be the most complex in nature, and they can strike prey with a crustacean karate chop from its claw, hard enough to crack a pane of glass. Other common residents on the rubble and sand substrate are crocodilefish, shrimp gobies and burrowing jawfish, protecting their broods of eggs in their agape mouths.