Montipora grisea

Appearance

It is an encrusting species considered to be massively sized, with "thick unifacial plates." It is usually dark brown or green in color, but also appears in shades of blue or pink.

Range and habitat

Montipora grisea has a vast range, found within the reefs of forty-five countries and territories throughout the Indian and Pacific oceans. Other threats include predation from the crown-of-thorns starfish, harvesting for the aquarium trade, climate change and ocean acidification.

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 grisea 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 Montipora grisea, Wikidata item Q3948842. 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.