Acropora squarrosa

The staghorn coral

It was first described by Ehrenberg in 1834.

Acropora colonies are the staghorns and tables of warm reefs: branching or plate-like skeletons that can add tissue quickly when the water stays clear, bright, and stable.

Acroporid corals are reef-builders. The animal is a colony of polyps sharing one calcium-carbonate skeleton, usually with photosynthetic algae in the tissue.

Range and habitat

Acropora squarrosa is recorded from American Samoa, Marshall Islands, Australia, Saudi Arabia, New Caledonia, and Egypt.

GBIF currently lists 134 occurrence points. Those points follow where people logged the taxon — museum drawers and surveys included — not a closed range boundary.

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 squarrosa 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 Cebuano Wikipedia article on Acropora squarrosa, translated and retold in English, plus Wikidata item Q3939054 and GBIF occurrence geography. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Confirm status and range on iucnredlist.org.