Endangered
Acropora aspera
Acropora aspera
Acropora aspera is a staghorn coral in the family Acroporidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
Acropora aspera varies in colour, being pale green, grey or brown, or occasionally pale blue.
Range and habitat
Acropora aspera is found in the Indian Ocean and western parts of the Pacific Ocean. It inhabits reef flats and lagoons and grows in water up to 5 metres (16 ft) deep. Where coral zoning occurs, it is found between the shallow water Acropora pulchra, that it closely resembles, and the deeper water Acropora millepora.
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 aspera 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 aspera, Wikidata item Q3952828. 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.
