This coral is often vividly coloured, with contrasting (often green) oral discs and brown, red or purple coenosarc, the living tissue that covers the skeleton between the polyps.

[2] Favites pentagona is native to the Indo-Pacific region where it occurs in shallow tropical and subtropical seas.

This means that it harbours symbiotic unicellular dinoflagellates in its tissues, which use the energy from sunlight to synthesize nutrients, from which the host coral benefits.

At night it extends its polyps to feed on plankton, and expands its elongated sweeper tentacles armed with stinging cells well beyond the limits of its base, so as to avoid being crowded or overgrown by other organisms.

In any one area, spawning tends to occur in synchrony, with all the corals liberating their gamete bundles at the same time.