Critically Endangered
Sunray Lettuce Coral
Helioseris cucullata
Sunray Lettuce Coral is a lettuce coral in the family Agariciidae (order Scleractinia) — Helioseris cucullata, recorded as Critically Endangered and tied to U.S. Virgin Islands, United States, and Puerto Rico.
The lettuce coral
Lettuce and sheet corals in Agariciidae form thin plates or leaves. The living animal is the polyps; the plate is the shared skeleton.
Stony corals secrete a hard calcium-carbonate skeleton. A named ‘species’ on a reef is a colony of polyps, often hosting zooxanthellae that need sunlit, relatively clear water.
Range and habitat
Its geographical distribution includes the tropical waters of the western Atlantic Ocean, from Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean and the Bahamas. It is a native species of Anguilla. Antigua and Barbuda; bahamas; barbados; belize; bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba (Saba, Sint Eustatius); cayman Islands; colombia; costa Rica; cuba; curaçao; dominica; dominican Republic; USA; grenade; guadeloupe; haiti; honduras; jamaica; mexico; montserrat; nicaragua; panama; saint Barthélemy; saint Kitts and Nevis; saint Lucia; saint Martin (French part); saint Vincent and the Grenadines; sint Maarten (Dutch part); trinidad and Tobago; turks and Caicos; venezuela and English Virgin Islands. Sunray Lettuce Coral is a coral in the family Agariciidae, belonging to the group of hard corals of the order Scleractinia.
GBIF currently lists 14,323 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.
Sunray Lettuce 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 Spanish Wikipedia article on Helioseris cucullata, translated and retold in English, plus Wikidata item Q3949450 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.
