Staghorn Coral

• reproducciónIt is a key reef-building species that breeds by releasing eggs and sperm together on a single night of the year, timed to the phases of the moon.
• It is the fastest-growing coral in the western Atlantic: its branches lengthen by 10 to 20 cm a year.
• It reproduces mainly asexually: branches that break off and reattach start new colonies, which allows a quick recovery from a storm but not from disease.
• Together with elkhorn coral and the star corals, it built the Caribbean reefs over the past 5,000 years.
• It was the main builder of the Caribbean's reefs, and its collapse is one of the best-documented ecological catastrophes of the sea.
• In the early 1980s an unprecedented epidemic cost it around 97% of its cover, its abundance and its occupied area, within a few years and across the whole Caribbean at once.
• That collapse did not just eliminate the coral: the three-dimensional structure of the shallow reef was lost, and with it the habitat of fish and invertebrates, along with the breakwater function that protected the coasts and allowed seagrass meadows and mangroves to exist behind them.
• Its cylindrical branches grow 2 to 8 cm thick and can exceed two metres in length.
• It grows very fast for a coral and reproduces by fragmentation, so it is the star species of restoration programmes: fragments are grown in underwater nurseries and transplanted onto the reef.
• The results are uneven: in the Florida Keys projects, five-year survival ranged between 4 and 89% depending on the site.
• And there is an irony to those nurseries: the main cause of death among the fragments transplanted in the Dominican Republic was predation by the bearded fireworm, Hermodice carunculata, which also has an entry in this catalogue.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - external calcareous skeleton of calcium carbonate (colonial cnidarian)

Habitat and environment

Fore reef, back reef and patch reefs of the Caribbean and the western Atlantic, between 0 and 30 m deep; the historic optimum band lay between 5 and 25 m

Size at birth

The zygote develops into a planktonic planula larva that spends days in the water column before settling

Sexual maturity

On reaching about 18 cm of colony height, between 3 and 8 years

Gestation / incubation

External fertilisation in the water column; the planula larvae spend several days in the plankton before attaching to hard substrate

Litter / clutch size

Broadcast spawning once a year. It is a simultaneous hermaphrodite: each colony produces both eggs and sperm, but does not self-fertilise

Sources consulted: IUCN Red List (e.T133381A3716457); NOAA Fisheries; U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service; SeaLifeBase; Lirman et al. 2014, PLOS ONE; Animal Diversity Web; Wallace 1999, Staghorn corals of the world

Best time: Visible all year round; the mass spawning happens once a year, in August or September, after the late-summer full moon