Endangered
Acropora aculeus
Acropora aculeus
Acropora aculeus is a staghorn coral in the family Acroporidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
This coral is usually yellowish or grey, but can be bright bluish-green, and the tips of the branches are often yellow, pale blue, green or brown. It is usually yellow on the Great Barrier Reef and in the Philippines, but pale brown in western Australia.
Range and habitat
Acropora aculeus is native to the Indo-Pacific region, its range extending from the east coast of Africa and Madagascar to Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, Australia and some island groups in the eastern Pacific Ocean. It is endemic to the Philippines distributed in Samoa, Great Barrier Reef, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and the Marshall Islands. It occurs at depths between about 5 and 20 m (16 and 66 ft) or even deeper.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
By day the polyps sit in sunlit water and feed the algae in their tissue; at night they can catch plankton. A colony does not walk. It lives or dies on that patch of reef.
A stony-coral colony is fixed. Growth, bleaching, and death happen in place. Collection and gear damage remove the skeleton as well as the tissue.
In crisis
It is an uncommon species and is particularly prone to coral bleaching, disease, and crown-of-thorns starfish predation. It is also harvested for use in aquaria, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed it as being a "endangered species".
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Branching acroporids are among the first corals to bleach in a marine heatwave and among the first to smash in a storm or under an anchor.
Acropora aculeus is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Acropora aculeus, Wikidata item Q3949232. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
