Elkhorn coral

Once the dominant shallow-water coral across the Caribbean, elkhorn coral was functionally lost from most of the basin by the early 2000s due to white-band disease, bleaching, and storms. A critical reef-builder, its branching structure creates the wave-breaking shallow-reef framework and provides shelter for juvenile fish. Critically endangered globally, with surviving populations now mostly restricted to isolated refugia. The Punta Sal garden is one of the largest continuous stands known in the western Caribbean — its presence here is the central evidence that Tela's reef is genuinely anomalous.