Organ Pipe Coral

• It is one of the few octocorals that builds a solid calcareous skeleton, and its bright red colour is only seen once the colony dies and the polyps are gone.
• Its polyps have eight branched tentacles rather than six or multiples of six as the hard corals do: this is the feature that separates the two great groups of corals.
• Its skeletons are sold as ornaments, a demand that has led to the genus being listed in Appendix II of CITES.
• Its skeleton is deep red and made of parallel vertical tubes joined by transverse platforms, like the pipes of an organ. Hence the name.
• It is an octocoral, so its polyps have eight feathery tentacles rather than the six of stony corals. In life those grey or greenish polyps completely hide the red skeleton, which only shows once the colony dies.
• That red skeleton has long been collected as an ornament, and that is one of the threats it faces.
• It hosts symbiotic zooxanthellae and depends on them, so it bleaches as the water warms.
• It is listed in Appendix II of CITES, like the stony corals and other hard-skeleton corals.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - external calcareous skeleton (octocoral)

Habitat and environment

Shallow reefs and lagoons of the Indo-Pacific, from 1 to 20 m

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Tubipora musica · Anatomia de Anthozoa · NCBI PMC12113132 (octocorales y Pennatulacea)