Endangered
Montipora cryptus
Montipora cryptus
Montipora cryptus is a pore coral in the family Acroporidae (order Scleractinia), recorded as Endangered and tied to Egypt and Mayotte.
The pore coral
It was first described by Veron in 2000.
Montipora spreads as thin plates, encrusting sheets, or fine branches. The living surface is pitted with tiny corallites rather than the large cups of a brain coral.
Acroporid corals are reef-builders. The animal is a colony of polyps sharing one calcium-carbonate skeleton, usually with photosynthetic algae in the tissue.
Range and habitat
Montipora cryptus is recorded from Egypt and Mayotte.
GBIF currently lists 13 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.
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.
Montipora cryptus 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 Cebuano Wikipedia article on Montipora cryptus, translated and retold in English, plus Wikidata item Q3942754 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.
