Endangered
Isopora palifera
Isopora palifera
Isopora palifera is a stony coral in the family Acroporidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
The colour of this coral is greenish, creamy or pale brown. This colour comes from minute symbiotic dinoflagellates known as zooxanthellae that live within the tissues of the coral polyps.
The branches are 5 to 15 cm (2 to 6 in) in diameter and up to 20 cm (8 in) long.
Range and habitat
Isopora palifera is found in the Indo-Pacific Ocean. Its range extends from South Africa and Madagascar to East Africa, Aldabra and Chagos, India, China, Japan, Indonesia and Australia. It is a reef building coral and is found subtidally on reef flats, edges walls and slopes.
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
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.
Isopora palifera 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 Isopora palifera, Wikidata item Q27991503. 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.
