Staghorn corals can be broadly divided into Atlantic and Indo-Pacific groups, and are generally found between 25˚N and 25˚S. The Atlantic group is by far the smaller of the two, being composed of only two extant species and a common hybrid, found along the Caribbean coasts of Central and South America, south-western Gulf of Mexico and the Bahamian archipelago. The Indo-Pacific
group is distributed across the tropics in suitable habitat all the way from the west coast of Central America to the Red Sea and East Africa, with the centre of diversity in the ‘Coral Triangle’ region of the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, East Timor, Philippines and Malaysia (IUCN 2009)