---
title: Black coral (Antipatharia)
scientific_name: Antipatharia
common_name: Black coral
rank: Order
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:14:19.980Z
tags: Black coral, Antipatharia, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/stinging/black-coral
---

# Black coral (*Antipatharia*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Order
- **Scientific name:** Antipatharia
- **Body shape:** Invertebrate - Not a fish - coral, mollusc, crustacean, echinoderm and other invertebrate groups.
- **Species listed here:** 1

## How to recognise this group

- variable colony shape: whip-like, branching, fan-like, or coiled
- exposed skeleton typically dark brown or jet-black
- small polyps with six tentacles covering the skeleton
- polyps often brightly coloured: white, red, green, yellow, or brown

Black coral is not black. The living animal is white, orange, yellow or green; the black is underneath it, and you have to kill the colony and strip it to ever see the thing it is named after.

The skeleton is the oddity. Reef corals build in limestone; a black coral builds a hard rod of protein and chitin, dark and covered in small spines, which is why the group is also called thorn coral. Over it sits a thin layer of soft polyps carrying six tentacles each, not the eight of the soft corals and sea fans, and unlike an anemone they cannot pull those tentacles in.

The rod is laid down in layers around a core, like the rings of a tree, and it can be counted and dated the same way. The results rearranged what people thought a coral was. A deep-water colony from Hawaii came back at more than four thousand years old, which puts black corals among the oldest living animals ever measured. Nothing growing at that rate recovers from being cut.

It has been cut for a long time. Antipatharia is Greek for against suffering, from the amulets people made of it; the skeleton takes a hard gloss under polish and has been worked into jewelry for thousands of years, and the whole order is now listed under CITES.

Black corals want darkness, so they live under overhangs, in caves and down the deep walls, in water that keeps moving, and most of the group sits below the depths sport divers work at. What you actually meet on a Red Sea wall is the wire coral: one unbranched stem standing straight out of the rock in a long open spiral, usually with a small goby or a shrimp riding on it and nothing else for company.


## Species (1)

- [Spiral Wire Coral (Cirrhipathes cf. spiralis)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/stinging/black-coral/spiral-wire-coral)

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/stinging/black-coral)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*