Acropora humilis
Acropora humilis, also known as finger coral, is a species of acroporid coral found in the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, the northern and southwestern Indian Ocean, Australia, the central Indo-Pacific, Japan, southeast Asia, the East China Sea, the central and western Pacific Ocean, the Johnston Atoll and the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. It also occurs in the Raja Ampat Islands, Mariana Islands, Palau, and the Pitcairn Islands. Occurring in tropical shallow reefs on upper reef flats and slopes at depths of up to 12 metres (39 ft), it was described by Dana in 1846.

MDC Seamarc Maldives · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- AcroporaPBDB
- Diet
- photosymbiotic, suspension feederPBDB, for Acroporidae
- Life habit
- colonial, clonalPBDB, for Acroporidae
- Motility
- stationary, attachedPBDB, for Scleractinia
- Vision
- blindPBDB, for Anthozoa
- Environment
- marinePBDB, for Scleractinia
Time the record covers
At least 5.3 million years on record.
The record covers at least 5.333 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 23.04 Mya to 0 Mya.
71 occurrences of Acropora humilis on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
71 occurrences- Miocene1%
- Pliocene2%
- Pleistocene78%
- Holocene18%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
3 formations
- Sobe Formation · Ryukyu Group5
- Aldabra Limestone Formation2
- Merizo Formation1
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The named rock units Acropora humilis has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 63 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Acropora humilis and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Acropora humilis and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
160 taxa- Porites11 sites
- Goniastrea stelligera10 sites
- Pocillopora verrucosa9 sites
- Acropora robusta7 sites
- Homotrema7 sites
- Hydrolithon onkodes7 sites
- Lithophyllum7 sites
- Carpenteria6 sites
- Goniastrea retiformis6 sites
- Leptoria phrygia6 sites
- Platygyra daedalea6 sites
- Acropora hyacinthus5 sites
- Goniastrea pectinata5 sites
- Neogoniolithon5 sites
- Pocillopora eydouxi5 sites
- Titanoderma5 sites
- Lithothamnion4 sites
- Mesophyllum4 sites
- Montipora4 sites
- Pocillopora4 sites
- Pocillopora damicornis4 sites
- Porolithon4 sites
- Acropora abrotanoides3 sites
- Dendropoma3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 18 sites for Acropora humilis, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
19 references- Escaping the heat: range shifts of reef coral taxa in coastal Western Australia30
- Variations in Pleistocene coral assemblages in space and time in southern and northern central Ryukyu Islands, Japan7
- Coral variation in two deep drill cores: significance for the Pleistocene development of the Great Barrier Reef7
- A 300000-yr coral reef record of sea level changes, Mururoa atoll (Tuamotu archipelago, French Polynesia)5
- Facies, Fossil Record, and Age of Pleistocene Reefs from the Red Sea (Saudi Arabia)4
- Late Quaternary reef growth and sea level in the Maldives (Indian Ocean)2
- Mass mortality following disturbance in Holocene coral reefs from Papua New Guinea2
- Wallace, 19992
- Faunal response to the instability of reef habitats: Pleistocene molluscan assemblages of Aldabra Atoll2
- The evolution of the Great Barrier Reef during the Last Interglacial Period1
- Late glacial to post glacial sea levels in the western Indian Ocean1
- Holocene sea-level changes and barrier reef formation on an oceanic island, Palau Islands, western Pacific1
Each of the 71 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. 7 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content2
Picture of Acropora humilis
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- MDC Seamarc Maldives
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
3D model
- Source
- Sketchfab
- Credit
- futuremaorereefs
- Licence
- CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
- Commercial use
- the licence does not allow it
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itAcropora through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Dana 1846)