Endangered
Acropora acuminata
Acropora acuminata
Acropora acuminata is a staghorn coral in the family Acroporidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
It is brown or pale blue in colour and appears similar to Acropora hoeksemai.
It was described by Addison Emery Verrill in 1864.
Range and habitat
It is found in the Red Sea, southeast Asia, Australia, the northern Indian Ocean, Japan, the central Indo-Pacific, the East China Sea and the western Pacific Ocean. Acropora acuminata is a acroporid coral found in Australia, the Red Sea, the central Indo-Pacific, Japan, the northern Indian Ocean, the East China Sea, southeast Asia, and the western Pacific Ocean. It is found on shallow coral reefs from depths of 5–20 m.
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
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 acuminata 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 acuminata, Wikidata item Q3940248. 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.
