Acropora hemprichii

Appearance

It has a smooth coenosteum, and the species is mainly brown or pink-brown.

Branches grow to diameters of between 12 and 30 millimetres (0.47 and 1.18 in) and lengths of around 80 millimetres (3.1 in).

Introduction Acropora hemprichii is a acroporid coral that was first described by Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg in 1834.

Range and habitat

Acropora hemprichii is common but only found in a small area. The Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, the Philippines, and the Indian Ocean. It is common with a wide range, and is listed on Appendix II of CITES.

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

The species is listed as endangered 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 hemprichii 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 hemprichii, Wikidata item Q3945969. 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.