Critically Endangered
Staghorn coral
Acropora cervicornis
The staghorn coral is a branching, stony coral, within the Order Scleractinia.
Appearance
Up until the late 1970s, much of the fore reef zones within the Atlantic around the coasts of Southern Florida and the Caribbean Islands were covered with vast, dense colonies of Staghorn coral consisting largely of single-species stands. Even so, a combination of white-band disease and various anthropogenic factors have reduced this coral coverage by over 95% in some areas.
Staghorn corals can exhibit very fast growth, adding up to 5 cm (~2 in) in new skeleton for every 1 cm of existing skeleton each year, making them one of the fastest growing fringe coral species in the Western Atlantic.
Range and habitat
Staghorn coral is found throughout the Western Atlantic Ocean, from the Florida Keys and the Bahamas, to the coasts of the various Caribbean islands. It occurs in the western Gulf of Mexico, but is absent from U.S. Waters in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as Bermuda and the west coast of South America. The northern limit of this species is Palm Beach County, Florida, where only small populations have been documented Staghorn coral is most commonly found within 20 meters (65 ft) of the water's surface, in clear, non-turbid environments consistent with fore, back and patch reefs in the Western Atlantic Ocean. In this environment, water temperatures typically range anywhere from 66 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit (19 - 27 degrees Celsius) with salinity ranging from 33 to 37 ppt (parts per thousand).
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
As of 2006, staghorn coral is listed as Critically Endangered under the International Union for Conservation of Nature and are federally designated as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
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.
Staghorn coral 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 Staghorn coral, Wikidata item Q618452. 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.
