Dichocoenia is a monotypic genus of stony coral in the family Meandrinidae. It is represented by a single species, Dichocoenia stokesii, which is commonly known as pineapple coral, elliptical star coral, or pancake star coral. It is mostly found in the Caribbean Sea and the western Atlantic Ocean. Dichocoenia stokesii has irregular calyces and its form can be either a massive, hemispherical hump or a flat, platform-like structure.
Dichocoenia is a monotypic genus of stony coral in the family Meandrinidae. It is represented by a single species, Dichocoenia stokesii, which is commonly known as pineapple coral, elliptical star coral, or pancake star coral. It is mostly found in the Caribbean Sea and the western Atlantic Ocean. Dichocoenia stokesii has irregular calyces and its form can be either a massive, hemispherical hump or a flat, platform-like structure.
==Description== Dichocoenia stokesi is a massive colonial coral that forms rounded humps up to in diameter or thick plates. It is recognisable by the fact that many of the corallites, the stony cups from which the coral polyps protrude, can be oval, or elongated. They can be up to long and only wide. Others are circular or Y-shaped and all have raised rims. The columella, the central axial structure in the corallite, is fragile and spongy. The polyps are large and well-separated with a diameter of about . The colour is variable and can be white, cream, orange, yellowish-brown, green, olive or brown and the septo-costae, the little ridges that surround the corallites, are white. Sometimes two individual corals grow side by side and intertwine, forming one hump, but in these circumstances they do not fuse and each retains its original colour.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).