Brain Root Coral

This species is highly susceptible to bleaching and moderately susceptible to disease. This species exhibited high bleaching and mortality in the 1998 bleaching event in Palau (Bruno et al. 2001).

The collection of this species for the aquarium trade may lead to overharvest and localised reductions in abundance, especially for populations of naturally rare species (Bruckner and Borneman 2006). However, the wild collection of corals is highly selective and considered low impact in the long-term relative to other activities such as coral mining and dynamite fishing (Green and Shirley 1999, Pratchett et al. 2020).

In general, the major threat to corals is global climate change, in particular, temperature extremes leading to bleaching and increased susceptibility to disease, increased severity of ENSO events and storms, and ocean acidification.

Coral disease has emerged as a serious threat to coral reefs worldwide with increases in numbers of diseases, coral species affected, and geographic extent (Ward et al. 2004, Sutherland et al. 2004, Sokolow et al. 2009). Outbreaks of coral diseases have damaged coral reefs worldwide with the most widespread, virulent, and longest running coral disease outbreak currently occurring on the Florida Reef Tract and throughout the Caribbean. The disease, stony coral tissue loss disease, has been ongoing since 2014 (Precht et al. 2016) and has devastated affected reefs along Florida (Walton et al. 2018, Williams et al. 2021) and throughout the Caribbean (Alvarez-Filip et al. 2019, Kramer et al. 2019). Numerous disease outbreaks have also occurred in the Indo-Pacific (Willis et al. 2004, Aeby et al. 2011; 2016), Indian Ocean (Raj et al. 2016) and Persian Gulf (Howells et al. 2020). Escalating anthropogenic stressors combined with the threats associated with global climate change of increases in coral disease, frequency and duration of coral bleaching and ocean acidification place coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific at high risk of collapse.

Localized threats to corals include fisheries, human development (industry, settlement, tourism, and transportation), changes in native species dynamics (competitors, predators, pathogens and parasites), invasive species (competitors, predators, pathogens and parasites), dynamite fishing, chemical fishing, pollution from agriculture and industry, domestic pollution, sedimentation, and human recreation and tourism activities. The severity of these combined threats to the global population of each individual species is not known.