Do you know your Collines from your Coralla? Your Paliform from your Petaloid or Phaceloid? Your Septa from your Septo Costae? Learn all these hard coral descriptive terms and most importantly, how to identify virtually all Indo-Pacific hard corals to at least genus level by treating yourself to an Online Coral ID Workshop.
Headed up by Russell Kelley, author of the BYO Guides Coral Finder, and with assistance from Dr. Kevin Erickson, The Online Coral ID Workshops are back for another year, and after overwhelmingly positive feedback from the two previous workshops, (we went on it last time,) they are now spanning 4 days and offering a total of 16 hours of Indo-Pacific Coral ID Training.
What to expect
The workshop will be based on the new 2022 Coral Finder Toolkit, a suite of proven, practical resources for coral identification. The Indo-Pacific Coral Finder uses a visual approach that makes it possible for beginners to advance rapidly with little prior knowledge.
The workshop uses audio-visual and hands-on training, tutorials, and instruction and includes a take-home Coral Finder Toolkit: Coral Finder 2022, a comprehensive workshop manual, and audiovisual training.
Participants learn how to use the newly updated Indo-Pacific Coral Finder 2022 to identify Indo-Pacific hard corals to genus regardless of growth form. (Also includes the stony non-scleractinians.) All you need is a computer and an internet connection.
Special emphasis is placed on techniques for field identification, self-directed learning, and problem-solving. For non-coral specialists, the workshop rapidly develops basic coral identification skills. Current or future coral specialists will upgrade their ID skills to the current state of molecular taxonomy.
The workshop provides an introduction to species identification and how to approach it maturely. The training applies equally topside or underwater. Even people with extensive prior knowledge of corals benefit significantly from the problem-solving training built into the Coral Finder workshop.
The workshop also summarizes the changes and implications of new molecular taxonomy findings while providing an easy-to-grasp, practical, field-focused approach to coral identification.
Who will benefit from the training?
If you are a coral retailer, farmer, wholesaler, importer, public aquarist, or even a keen hobbyist you will benefit massively from this friendly, informative course, and after just four days you will be able to methodically identify pretty much any Indo-Pacific hard coral that’s thrown at you. Or at least rule out lots of others.
As exciting as the reef hobby currently is, we are all dazzled by bright colors and made-up names that detract from the skeleton underneath, and the details that help us properly ID a hard coral, what it’s related to, as well as better understand its habitat in the wild and its needs in the aquarium. Some mature reefers may feel they don’t need it or won’t learn from it, but even coral experts take the course as refreshers and you are guaranteed to learn some very valuable identification tools. We highly recommend it, and wish we could go to Coral School every day!
When is it?
This time there are two workshops, one in November 2023 and one in January 2024, to cater to different global zones. November 9 2023 is the deadline for EU focussed timezones and January 4th, 2024 is the deadline for North and South American timezones. If you want to know which one will suit your timezone get in touch with them at the link below.
Info and Registration at: https://byoguides.com/
