Millepora alcicornis

Appearance

The cylindrical branches usually grow in a single plane and span a range of hues from brown to pale, cream-like yellow, while branch tips are white.

Range and habitat

Millepora alcicornis is found in the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, Florida, the Cape Verde Islands, and along the coast of Central and South America as far south as Brazil. More recently Colonies have also appeared in the Canary Islands and on the island of Madeira. It has also been found in Bermuda, but the morphology at that location is so different from that in the rest of its range that it may be a distinct species.

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

Habits

This hydrozoan order includes fire corals: colonial stingers with a hard skeleton on shallow reefs.

In crisis

It is an important member of the reef building community and subject to the same threats as other corals. Although not a true coral, Millepora alcicornis is subject to the same general threats that corals and coral reefs are facing. Other general threats to reefs include ocean acidification, pollution, sedimentation, invasive species and other changes in species dynamics, coral diseases, fisheries, leisure activities and tourism.

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

Millepora alcicornis 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 Millepora alcicornis, Wikidata item Q519338. 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.