Endangered
Acropora loripes
Acropora loripes
Acropora loripes is a staghorn coral in the family Acroporidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Endangered.
The staghorn coral
The branchlets are 5 to 12 mm (0.2 to 0.5 in) wide and up to 45 millimetres (1.8 in) in length.
Range and habitat
Acropora loripes is native to the tropical Indo-Pacific. Its range extends from the Red Sea to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Australia. It occurs subtidally at depths between 5 and 25 metres (16 and 82 ft) in various habitats among them upper reef slopes and reef flats.
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
Acropora loripes is threatened more by damage to the reefs where it lives rather than specific threats to this coral. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species lists it as being an endangered species.
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 loripes 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 loripes, Wikidata item Q3940176. 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.
