Endangered
Acropora polystoma
Acropora polystoma
Acropora polystoma is a staghorn coral in the family Acroporidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
It is blue, cream, yellow, lavender, or brown in colour, and the branches are similar in size and become thinner towards the ends.
The branchlets have lengths of up to 100 millimetres (3.9 in) and diameters of between 5 and 15 millimetres (0.20 and 0.59 in).
Introduction Acropora polystoma is a acroporid coral that was first described by G.
Range and habitat
Acropora polystoma is uncommon and found over a large area. The Gulf of Aden, the Indian Ocean, the Indo-Pacific, Southeast Asia, Australia, and the western Pacific. The species also occurs in Japan, American Samoa, the Cook Islands, and five regions of Indonesia. It is listed as an endangered species on the IUCN Red List, is under CITES Appendix II, and might be found in Marine Protected Areas.
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 an endangered 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 polystoma 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 polystoma, Wikidata item Q3955637. 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.
