Montipora patula

Appearance

Montipora patula form small, encrusting colonies or tiered plates that are brownish in color with lighter borders. Around the corallites are small papillae, that are usually tan in color. Polyps are usually purple in color.

Range and habitat

Montipora patula is endemic to the Hawaiian Islands. Montipora patula, also called the sandpaper or ringed rice coral, is a coral species in the family Acroporidae endemic to Hawaii and is considered a vulnerable species.

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 patula is Critically 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 patula, Wikidata item Q3952061. 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.