Lamarck's Sheet Coral

The lettuce coral

It was first described by Milne Edwards ug Jules Haime in 1851.

Agaricia corals grow as thin, leafy or plated colonies — the ‘lettuce’ in the English names. The ridges follow the skeleton, not painted colour.

Lettuce and sheet corals in Agariciidae form thin plates or leaves. The living animal is the polyps; the plate is the shared skeleton.

Range and habitat

Lamarck's Sheet Coral is recorded from U.S. Virgin Islands, United States, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Guadeloupe, and Curaçao.

GBIF currently lists 15,499 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.

Habits

Sheet and lettuce corals need a hard bottom and enough light for their algae. Sediment that settles on the plates smothers polyps.

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.

Thin-plated lettuce corals smother under sediment and heat-bleach with the rest of the shallow reef.

Lamarck's Sheet Coral is Critically 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 Agaricia lamarcki, translated and retold in English, plus Wikidata item Q3952134 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.