Lamarck's sheet coral

About

Lamarck's lettuce-leaf coral (Agaricia lamarcki) is a Caribbean species that builds broad, flat plates arranged in layered whorls, giving colonies an almost sculptural, tiered appearance. The surface is textured with concentric valleys housing the corallites, which are spaced out enough to be counted individually. Roughly three to five per centimeter. One of the most reliable identification features is the coloration: a warm rust-brown body, typically with pale or whitish margins along the plate edges, and small white star-shaped mouths scattered across the surface. That combination of features makes it fairly easy to distinguish from other plate-forming corals in the Atlantic. In the wild it ranges across the Caribbean Sea, turning up from shallow reef flats all the way down to considerable depths, which already hints at its flexibility with light. In the aquarium this tolerance translates well. Lamarck's sheet coral is one of the few stony corals genuinely suited to lower-light and lower-flow setups, which is somewhat unusual for an SPS coral. That accessibility, combined with its calm growth habit and lack of aggressive sweeper tentacles, makes it a reasonable choice for reef keepers who want a plating coral without the demanding conditions many similar species require.