Montipora spongodes

The pore coral

It was first described by Bernard in 1897.

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 spongodes is recorded from Australia, Japan, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Seychelles, and Norfolk Island.

GBIF currently lists 250 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 spongodes 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 spongodes, translated and retold in English, plus Wikidata item Q3953099 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.