Endangered
Acropora subulata
Acropora subulata
Acropora subulata is a staghorn coral in the family Acroporidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Endangered and tied to Australia, Indonesia, and Japan.
Appearance
It is yellow, blue, or cream in colour, and the branches are upward-facing, become thinner towards the ends, and are caespitosed.
Radial corallites are present up the sides of the branchlets, and each contains a small opening (below 1 mm (0.039 in) in size).
Introduction Acropora kimbeensis is a acroporid coral that was first described by Dr.
Range and habitat
Acropora kimbeensis is found over a large area but is uncommon. The Indo-Pacific, the East China Sea, west Pacific, Eastern Australia, Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea, Osprey Reef Coral Sea, Micronesia, and Pohnpei. It occurs in one region of Indonesia, and at two sites of the Marshall Islands. It is listed as a vulnerable species on the IUCN Red List and is listed under CITES Appendix II, and can occur within Marine Protected Areas.
GBIF currently lists 860 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
It is listed as a vulnerable species on the IUCN Red List, and it is thought to have 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 subulata 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 kimbeensis, Wikidata item Q13227646 and GBIF occurrence geography. 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.
