Endangered
Leaf plate montipora
Montipora capricornis
Leaf plate montipora, also known as the leaf plate montipora, vase coral, cap coral, or plating montipora, is a type of small polyp stony (SPS) coral in the family Acroporidae.
Appearance
The polyps are usually transparent with slight patches of color due to zooxanthellae, symbiotic algae living in the coral's tissue.
Range and habitat
M. Capricornis is a very common species of coral, particularly in the Indian and Pacific oceans, as well as in reefs in the Red Sea. It usually inhabits the top half of the reef where photosynthesis can occur. M. Capricornis will "branch out" from their foundation into an area with adequate sunlight.
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
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
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.
Leaf plate montipora 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 Leaf plate montipora, Wikidata item Q2890903. 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.
