Acropora carduus

The staghorn coral

It was first described by James Dwight Dana in 1846.

Acropora colonies are the staghorns and tables of warm reefs: branching or plate-like skeletons that can add tissue quickly when the water stays clear, bright, and stable.

Acroporid corals are reef-builders. The animal is a colony of polyps sharing one calcium-carbonate skeleton, usually with photosynthetic algae in the tissue.

Range and habitat

Acropora carduus is a acroporid coral found in the northern Indian Ocean and the central Indo-Pacific.

GBIF currently lists 570 occurrence points. Those points follow where people logged the taxon — museum drawers and surveys included — not a closed range boundary.

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 carduus 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 carduus — often a short stub, Wikidata item Q3940601 and GBIF occurrence geography. 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.