Echinopora horrida is a plating and branching scleractinian coral (family Merulinidae) distributed across the tropical Indo-Pacific, with colonies forming thin, expansive plates or irregular branching structures with distinctive spiny projections and widely spaced corallites—features from which its epithet ('horrida', meaning rough or bristly) derives. The species maintains photosymbiosis with Symbiodiniaceae and inhabits diverse reef microhabitats. Genomic data have been generated for this species and are available in public databases, enabling comparative studies of cnidarian evolution and ecology.