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| hard corals text index | photo index |
| Phylum Cnidaria > Class Anthozoa > Subclass Zoantharia/Hexacorallia > Order Scleractinia > Family Merulinidae |
| Ridged
plate coral Merulina sp.* Family Merulinidae updated Nov 11 Where seen? This plate-like coral with radiating ridges is sometimes seen on some of our Southern shores. Features: Colony 10-15cm, encrusting plates or fans, sometimes with knobbly fingers sticking out of the plates. There are thick, short ridges that form meandering valleys, radiating from the centre perpendicular to the edges. The valleys are short and straight, spreading like a fan from the centre and sometimes dividing into several valleys. The polyp mouths are in the valleys. It has few, long tentacles which are rarely seen. Colour seen include brown, blue and green with polyp mouths the same colour or blue. There are two species of ridged corals recorded for Singapore: Merulina scabricula and M. ampliata are similar in appearance. M. scabricula has finer skeleton structures. |
 Raffles Lighthouse, Jul 06  |
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Ridged plate corals on Singapore shores
 Sisters Island, Oct 11 |
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 Tentacles rarely seen. |
 Raffles Lighthouse, Jul 06 |
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 Pulau Semakau, Aug 11 |
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 Sisters Island, Apr 04  |
 Kusu Island, Aug 04  |
 Sisters Island, Jul 06  |
more photos of ridged plate corals on Singapore shores
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8
*Species are difficult to positively identify without close examination.
On this website, they are grouped by external features for convenience of display.
| Merulina
species recorded for Singapore from Danwei Huang, Karenne P. P. Tun, L. M Chou and Peter A. Todd. 30 Dec 2009. An inventory of zooxanthellate sclerectinian corals in Singapore including 33 new records **the species found on many shores in Danwei's paper. in red are those listed as threatened on the IUCN global list.
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Links
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Australian Institute of Marine Science, Australia. 3 volumes.
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