Endangered
Acropora microclados
Acropora microclados
Acropora microclados is a staghorn coral in the family Acroporidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
It is usually pale pink/brown in colour, and its tentacles extend during the day, and are grey.
The structures consist of branchlets, that are short, become thin at the ends, and orderly, and the width of the branchlet bases can reach 10 mm (0.39 in).
Introduction Acropora microclados is a acroporid coral that was first described by Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg in 1834.
Range and habitat
Acropora microclados is found over a large range and is uncommon. The Indo-Pacific Ocean, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden, the East China Sea, the West Pacific, the Cook Islands, Australia, Japan, Southeast Asia, Samoa, and Chagos. It occurs in five regions of Indonesia. It occurs at temperatures of 25.48 to 27.23 °C (77.86 to 81.01 °F).
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 an endangered species on the IUCN Red List, and its population is decreasing.
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 microclados 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 microclados, Wikidata item Q3953963. 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.
