Animalia > Cnidaria > Anthozoa > Scleractinia > Merulinidae > Orbicella > Orbicella annularis

Orbicella annularis (boulder star coral; Caribbean star coral)

Synonyms:

Wikipedia Abstract

Orbicella annularis, commonly known as the boulder star coral, is a species of coral that lives in the western Atlantic Ocean and is the most thoroughly studied and most abundant species of reef-building coral in the Caribbean to date. It also has a comprehensive fossil record within the Caribbean. This species complex has long been considered a generalist that exists at depths between 0 and 80 meters that grew into varying colony shapes (heads, columns, plates) in response to differing light conditions. Only recently with the help of molecular techniques has O. annularis been shown to be a complex of at least three separate species. Those species are divided into O. annularis, O. faveolata, and O. franksi. This coral used to be known as Montastraea annularis.
View Wikipedia Record: Orbicella annularis

Endangered Species

Status: Endangered
View IUCN Record: Orbicella annularis

Prey / Diet

Predators

External References

NatureServe Explorer

Citations

Attributes / relations provided by
♦ 1Jorrit H. Poelen, James D. Simons and Chris J. Mungall. (2014). Global Biotic Interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. Ecological Informatics.
♦ 2The importance of the gastropod Coralliophila abbreviata (Lamarck) and the polychaete Hermodice carunculata (Pallas) as coral reef predators, Bruce Ott, John B. Lewis, Canadian Journal of Zoology, 1972, 50(12): 1651-1656
♦ 3del Monaco, Carlos, Estrella Villamizar, and Samuel Narciso. "Selectivity of preys of Coralliophila abbreviata and C. caribaea in coral reefs of the National Park Morrocoy, Venezuela: an experimental approximation/Selectividad de presas de Coralliophila abbreviata y C. caribaea en arrecifes coralinos del Parque Nacional Morrocoy, Venezuela: una aproximacion experimental." Latin American Journal of Aquatic Research 38.1 (2010): 57+. Academic OneFile. Web. 15 July 2014.
♦ 4Live coral predation by parrotfishes (Perciformes: Scaridae) in the Abrolhos Bank, eastern Brazil, with comments on the classification of species into functional groups, Ronaldo B. Francini-Filho, Rodrigo L. Moura, Camilo M. Ferreira and Ericka O. C. Coni, Neotropical Ichthyology, 6(2):191-200, 2008
Abstract provided by DBpedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0