Endangered
Acropora paniculata
Acropora paniculata
Acropora paniculata is a staghorn coral in the family Acroporidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
Blue, grey, or cream in colour, the branchlets contain axial, incipient axial, and radial corallites.
Acropora paniculata occurs in colonies with plate-like structures, that are over 1 m (3.3 ft) wide and 25 mm (0.98 in) deep.
Introduction Acropora paniculata is a acroporid coral that was first described by Addison Emery Verrill in 1902.
Range and habitat
Acropora paniculata is found over a large area but is uncommon. The Indo-Pacific, the East China Sea, the western Pacific, the Hawaiian Islands, the central Pacific, the Rodrigues, the Society Islands, the Johnston Atoll, Southeast Asia, Japan, and Eastern Australia. It occurs in five regions of Indonesia, and at seven locations on the Marshall Islands. It occurs at temperatures between 25.48 and 28.07 °C (77.86 and 82.53 °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 classed as a vulnerable species on the IUCN Red List, and it 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 paniculata 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 paniculata, Wikidata item Q3932168. 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.
