Eusmilia

Appearance

At night, the polyps stretch out their translucent white tentacles to feed and the coral "flowers". This coral is usually cream, yellow or pale brown, often with a green or pink tinge.

Range and habitat

Smooth flower coral is found in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Bahamas and southern Florida, at depths down to about 60 metres (200 ft) though it is commonest between 5 and 30 metres (16 and 98 ft). It is found on both the back and the front edges of reefs and is sometimes overhung by larger corals. It is found on reefs in the Caribbean Sea.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Breeding

The fertilized egg develops into a planula larva that forms part of the zooplankton and drifts with the current.

In crisis

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Warm-water bleaching, sedimentation, destructive fishing, and the curio trade sit behind many stony-coral badges. That is the group backdrop — confirm the official criteria for this name on the Red List.

Eusmilia 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 Eusmilia, Wikidata item Q2785489. 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.