Tall vertical columns with the polyps extended by day, so the surface looks furred. Uncommon, unmistakable, and hit hard by stony coral tissue loss disease.
Thick blunt cylindrical spires rising vertically from an encrusting base, like a cluster of fingers or a small organ pipe. Columns reach 3 m tall; a Florida survey found an average colony 168 cm across and 124 cm high, with the largest at 531 cm across. Pale tan to grey-brown.
The best field mark is that the polyps are out during the day, which almost no other Caribbean stony coral does, giving the columns a soft furry waving surface. Nothing else in the Caribbean looks like this.
It lives on hard bottom and reef spur between about 1 and 20 m. It has separate sexes, which is unusual for a Caribbean coral, and its recruitment is extremely poor. It is the only species in its genus.
It was uplisted to critically endangered in December 2022, one step below extinct in the wild, and it is highly susceptible to stony coral tissue loss disease. Florida is effectively finished: between 2013 and 2020 the reef tract lost 86 per cent of its genotypes and 93 per cent of its colonies, and by the end of 2020 every remaining colony was either diseased, dead or severely damaged, with about twenty-five genotypes left and the survivors held in gene banks. Do not expect to see one in Florida. The Bahamas and Cayman are the realistic places.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
