Staghorn coral grows in cylindrical branches that extend at rates measured in centimetres per year, among the quickest of any Atlantic stony coral. That speed comes with brittleness. Branch tips snap easily under wave energy, and a fragment that lands on hard substrate can cement itself down and resume growing.
The result is a thicket that may be one clone repeated hundreds of times. Genetic surveys of Caribbean stands have repeatedly found low genotypic diversity, with a handful of distinct individuals accounting for large areas of apparently dense reef. Sexual reproduction still happens: colonies are hermaphroditic broadcast spawners releasing egg-sperm bundles in late summer, but successful recruitment from larvae is rarely observed.
The common misreading is that fragmentation makes the species resilient. It does allow restoration nurseries to propagate stock quickly, and that work is now routine in Florida. But a clonal thicket offers a pathogen or a heat event a uniform target, and the collapse that followed white-band disease in the 1980s removed most historical cover across the region.