Endangered
Acropora divaricata
Acropora divaricata
Acropora divaricata is a staghorn coral in the family Acroporidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Endangered and tied to Australia, Japan, and Indonesia.
Appearance
It is a light brown, white, or cream colour, and the branch ends are upturned, except on the outside of the structure.
The branches may grow to lengths of up to 150 millimetres (5.9 in) and diameters of between 7 and 15 millimetres (0.28 and 0.59 in).
Introduction Acropora hoeksemai is a acroporid coral that was first described by Dr.
Range and habitat
Acropora hoeksemai is a common species and found over a large range. The Solomans, the Indo-Pacific oceans, Papua New Guinea, Okinawa, Southeast Asia, and Thailand. It is native to Australia, Indonesia (found in five regions), Malaysia, Japan, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and the Solomon Islands. Some species could be found in Marine Protected Areas.
GBIF currently lists 2,342 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
It is listed as a endangered species on the IUCN Red List, and has a decreasing population.
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 divaricata 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 hoeksemai, Wikidata item Q3951393 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.
