Montipora peltiformis

The pore coral

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 peltiformis is recorded from Australia, Japan, American Samoa, Marshall Islands, United States Minor Outlying Islands, and New Caledonia.

GBIF currently lists 365 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 peltiformis 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 Wikidata item Q3950161 and GBIF occurrence geography. No dedicated encyclopedia article was available at build time. Family and order context is original writing about the group — not a claim that a monograph exists for this name. Not an IUCN assessment. Confirm status and range on iucnredlist.org.