Critically Endangered
Agaricia tenuifolia
Agaricia tenuifolia
Agaricia tenuifolia is a lettuce coral in the family Agariciidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
The colour of this coral is usually pale brown, reddish-brown or greenish-brown.
Range and habitat
A. Tenuifolia is native to the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. It is common in the southern part of this range but less so in the north. It occurs on shallow-water reefs and lagoons at depths between 1 and 15 metres (3 and 49 ft).
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
For these reasons, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed its conservation status as being critically endangered.
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.
Agaricia tenuifolia 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 English Wikipedia article on Agaricia tenuifolia, Wikidata item Q3949052. 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.
