---
title: Brain Root Coral (Lobophyllia corymbosa)
scientific_name: Lobophyllia corymbosa
common_name: Brain Root Coral
taxon: Hard corals
conservation_status: VU - Vulnerable
published: 2024-01-02T19:10:21.942Z
updated: 2026-08-17T13:50:00.234Z
tags: Brain Root Coral, Lobophyllia corymbosa, Hard corals, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/stinging/hard-corals/brain-root-coral
---

# Brain Root Coral (*Lobophyllia corymbosa*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Hard corals (*Scleractinia*)
- **Size:** up to 50 cm
- **Depth:** 1-40 m
- **Diet:** Photosynthetic
- **Activity:** Nocturnal
- **Rarity:** Common
- **Habitat:** Upper reef slopes
- **Reproduction:** Broadcast spawner
- **CITES:** Appendix II
- **Conservation status:** VU - Vulnerable

## How to recognise it

- fleshy lobes 15 to 30 cm long, joined at their bases
- flat sheets or a hemispherical dome, often over half a meter across
- prickly stony ridges on the wall of each cup
- polyps pulled in by day, tentacles out at night
- up to 50 cm and larger here than in most of its range

Corals fight. They cannot move, so the war for space is chemical and digestive: a colony that meets a competitor pushes mesenterial filaments, the same tissue it uses to digest food, out through its own body wall and onto the neighbor, and dissolves the tissue where the two touch. Some species also grow long sweeper tentacles specifically to reach across a gap and sting. The bare strip you sometimes see between two colonies is not empty ground. It is where both sides have killed each other's tissue and neither can advance.

This is one of the large-polyp corals, and the scale makes it easy to see what a coral actually is. Each fleshy lobe, fifteen to thirty centimeters long, is essentially one enormous polyp sitting in its own stony cup, and the whole animal is a set of those lobes joined at the base. By day the polyps are withdrawn and the coral looks like folded brain tissue.

The color, bluish, greenish-gray or yellow-brown, is not really the animal's. It comes from the zooxanthellae in its tissue, and so does most of its food.

The Red Sea is where the species was first described, and colonies here run larger than almost anywhere else.

## Also known as

- **English:** brain coral, Brain Root Coral, lobed cactus coral, lobed cup coral
- **German:** Faltenbecherkoralle, Falten-Becherkoralle, Gelappte Becherkoralle
- **Czech:** rifovník obecný
- **Japanese:** マルハナガタサンゴ
- **Chinese:** 束瓣葉珊瑚
- **Russian:** Лобофиллия щитковая
- **LT:** Kaktusinis skiautenis
- **TH:** ปะการังสมองหยาบรูปถ้วย

## Scientific synonyms

- *Caryophyllia corymbosa* (Forskål, 1775)
- *Lobophyllia corymbosa var. cactus* (Dana, 1846)
- *Lobophyllia corymbosa var. ringens* Milne Edwards & Haime, 1849
- *Lobophyllia eydouxi* Milne Edwards & Haime, 1849
- *Lobophyllia eydouxii* Milne Edwards & Haime, 1849
- *Lobophyllia fistulosa* Milne Edwards & Haime, 1849
- *Lobophyllia ringens* Milne Edwards & Haime, 1849
- *Lobophyllia rudis* Milne Edwards & Haime, 1849
- *Madrepora corymbosa* Forskål, 1775
- *Mussa cactus* Dana, 1846
- *Mussa corymbosa* (Forskål, 1775)
- *Mussa eydouxi* (Milne Edwards & Haime, 1849)
- *Mussa fistulosa* (Milne Edwards & Haime, 1849)
- *Mussa glomerata* Haime & Milne Edwards, 1857
- *Mussa ringens* (Milne Edwards & Haime, 1849)
- *Mussa rudis* (Milne Edwards & Haime, 1849)

## Range

Ashmore-Cartier Is., Australia, Fiji, India, Indian Ocean, Indonesia, Madagascar, Marshall Islands, Mozambique, North Pacific Ocean, Papua New Guinea, Red Sea, Saudi Arabia, Seychelles, South Pacific Ocean, United States

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/stinging/hard-corals/brain-root-coral)*
*Updated: August 17, 2026*