Endangered
Acropora palmerae
Acropora palmerae
Acropora palmerae is a staghorn coral in the family Acroporidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
The species is pink- or green-brown in colour.
It was described by Wells in 1954.
Range and habitat
It occurs in the northern Indian Ocean, the central Indo-Pacific, Australia, Southeast Asia, Japan, the East China Sea and the oceanic west Pacific Ocean. It also occurs in Palau and the Mariana Islands, American Samoa, the Andaman Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, Okinawa Island, Mauritius, Micronesia, the Cook Islands and the Philippines. It is found at depths of between 0 and 12 metres (0 and 39 ft) in tropical shallow reefs on exposed flats or in lagoons. Acropora palmerae is a acroporid coral found in the northern Indian Ocean, the central Indo-Pacific, Australia, Southeast Asia, Japan, the East China Sea and the oceanic west Pacific Ocean.
It is also found in Palau and the Mariana Islands, American Samoa, the Andaman Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, Okinawa Island, Mauritius, Micronesia, the Cook Islands and the Philippines.
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 palmerae 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 palmerae, Wikidata item Q3944446. 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.
