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Turbinaria mesenterina

Overview
Conservation Attention
Threats

About

Turbinaria mesenterina is an enchanting and intricate scleractinian coral species whose colonies vary from brown to bright green in colour. The colonies form swirling layers of plates which interlock and fuse giving the appearance of a stone rose.

This species is widespread and common throughout its range however, due to this unique and desirable morphology it is targeted for the aquarium trade, primarily in Indonesia, and has suffered extensive reductions as a result.

It is is an ecologically important reef building coral which provides a significant proportion of the benthic cover in reef habitats. In reef building corals, individual polyps sequester and excrete calcium carbonate as an external skeleton for protection. Specific oceanic conditions are required for polyps to synthesize and exude calcium carbonate.

There is no further species-specific population information for this species.

Order: Scleractinia
Family: Dendrophylliidae
Trend: unknown
Depth Range (m): 3 - 20m

EDGE Score

EDGE Score: 4.25 (?)

ED Score: 16.58 (?)

GE / IUCN Red List (?)

Distribution

This is a wide ranging species, seen across the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, West and Central Pacific Ocean.

Habitat and Ecology

T. mesenterina is common in shallow turbid tropical reef environments with colonies being found between 9-15m in the South China Sea and Gulf of Siam but with a maximum depth of 20m.

The species in this genus are gonochoric, an unusual trait shared by only a quarter of hard coral species. Also unusually, this species, which is a broadcast spawner was found to have a spawning season that was 4-6 months out of sync with neighboring coral species around Australia and probably other parts of the world.

Find out more

IUCN Red List

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Conservation Actions

For each key category of conservation action, we calculated a conservation attention score based on expert information. In this graph, a higher score means the action is being carried out more intensively over more of the species range. The colour shows how important each action is considered to be for the conservation of this species.

Engaging stakeholders	19
Addressing threats	37
Status of knowledge	22
Management plan	0
Capacity building	0
Behaviour change	0
Awareness raising	11
Funding	0
Legislation	67
	0 20 40 60 80 100
	Score: 100 means the activity occurs at high level across more than 75% of the species range
	Priority: High Medium Low Very Low

Overall Conservation Attention

We combined all of the expert information on conservation actions to calculate an overall conservation attention score for this species. Please help us to reach our goal of establishing dedicated conservation attention at “High” levels for all EDGE species.

Very Low Low Medium High

17%

More information

Recent studies have grouped all possible conservation activities for any species into nine key categories (Washington et. al 2015). For each action, we asked experts for each species to assess the extent to which that action is being carried out and how much of the species’ range that action occurs in. For each action we used these two pieces of information to calculate the conservation attention score per action. A score of 100 means that the action is being carried out to a high level across at least 75% of the species range. We then combined the scores for all actions into an overall conservation attention score for the species. The experts also judged how important each category was to the conservation of that particular species.

This wordcloud illustrates the threats facing this species. The size of each word indicates the extent of a species range that is affected by that threat (larger size means a greater area is affected). The colour of the word indicates how much that threat impacts the species (darker shades of red mean the threat is more severe).