Symmetrical Brain Coral

The symmetrical brain coral forms huge, dome-shaped colonies that can look like a giant brain resting on the reef. It grows slowly and can live for a very long time.

It looks like the grooved brain coral, but its ridges are smoothly rounded with no groove running along the top, unlike its lookalike.

This coral forms smooth flat plates or rounded domes, their surface covered in winding, maze-like valleys. Tiny polyps sit in cup-shaped pits called corallites along these valleys, with rounded ridges between them. Colour comes from algae living in its tissue and ranges from yellowish or greenish brown to occasional blue-grey, with the valleys often a paler shade.

This coral lives in shallow Caribbean and West Atlantic waters, down to about 47 m. It grows on reefs but also on muddy seabed where few other corals survive.

By day the polyps stay pulled inside their corallites. At night they reach out a ring of tentacles to catch drifting zooplankton, while algae living in the coral's tissue also supply it with food from sunlight.

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  Boulder Brain Coral

  Colpophyllia natans

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  Cauliflower Coral

  Pocillopora verrucosa

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  Common Mushroom Coral

  Fungia fungites

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  Finger Coral

  Porites porites

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  Knobby brain coral

  Pseudodiploria clivosa

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  Mustard Hill Coral

  Porites astreoides