Staghorn Coral

Fascinating facts about the Staghorn Coral

• The staghorn coral's thick, upright branches can grow beyond two metres, giving the colony the antler-like shape that inspired its name. These massive branches are most often found on fore, back and patch reefs where the water is clear and no deeper than twenty metres. Because the coral can quickly add new skeletal material, it becomes a dominant reef-building species.
• Staghorn coral can lay down up to five centimetres of new skeleton for every centimetre of existing structure each year, a growth rate that ranks it among the fastest-growing fringe corals in the Western Atlantic. This rapid accretion allows colonies to reach heights of more than two metres within a few decades.
• Since the late 1970s, white-band disease together with other human pressures has eliminated more than ninety-five percent of staghorn coral cover in many locations, dramatically reshaping Caribbean reefs. The disease, first recorded in 1979, has been identified as the chief cause of this massive decline over the past three decades.
• When white-band disease strikes a Staghorn colony, the dying tissue moves rapidly along the branches, advancing up to 4 cm each day. This erosion removes roughly 21 cm² of living tissue per day, and as the infection spreads the colony's overall coverage can drop from about 96 % to just 12 %. In total an infected colony loses around 84 % of its tissue and suffers a mortality rate of roughly 28 %.
• The coral's tissues are packed with symbiotic zooxanthellae at astonishing densities, sometimes exceeding one million cells per square centimetre. These dinoflagellates, which have lost their flagella and become immobile, supply up to 90 % of the coral's nutritional requirements, providing lipids, amino acids, sugars and oxygen. This relationship lets the Staghorn thrive in nutrient-poor waters by recycling almost all needed resources.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

At a glance

About the Staghorn Coral

Staghorn coral is one of the most important reef-building corals in the Caribbean. Its branching antler-like structures once dominated shallow reef zones from Florida to South America, creating complex three-dimensional habitats for fish, invertebrates, and other marine life. A single colony can grow large enough to shelter an entire ecosystem.

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