Corals of the World Online which replaced the indispensable CoralSearch a couple of years ago has already received a facelift of its own. The new cleaner layout has mostly familiar elements but the one thing that is greatly noticeable right off the bat is how much faster this old database has become.
CoralSearch and Coral of the World Online are the digital format of the now out-of-print Coral of the World by JEN Veron, the grandfather of modern stony coral taxonomy. If you can’t tell a Cycloseris from a Fungia or are trying to figure what species of Leptoseris that is, COTW online is the best and practically only resource of its kind for in depth stony coral identification and knowledge.
The new layout of COTW online is nice and all but if you spend half as much time on there as we do, you’ll recall that pages always loaded at varying degrees of dial-up slow. When Coral Search became COTW online things improved a bit but a lot of the images would take their sweet time loading. Finally, the new refresh of COTW is lightning fast, with all images loading super quick.
There have been times when faced with a heady coral ID that reaching for the three volume set of COTW seemed like a faster and easier way to compare different corals. Now that the new COTW online website is firing on all cylinders, we encourage all of you become more familiar with it so that you will know why there’s no such thing as Acanthastrea maxima in the aquarium trade and see what amazing diversity can be found in Pavonas and Leptoseris. [COTW online]
