It’s easy to get caught up in aquarium dogma and the reefing world is no different with prescribed military food tray style separation of all corals. But in practice the interactions between corals that are similar, and between those that…
LPS Corals
The coral tree of life is being rewritten one LPS at a time
Warning: the following is a nerdgasm of coral taxonomy, guest-written by Joe Rowlett, one of the many talented fish geeks working the fish tanks at Old Town Aquarium in Chicago. Historically, corals have often been grouped at the genus and family level based…
Fiery-eyed Mycedium will practically melt your retinas
Sometimes all it takes is one perfect picture to relay the absolute beauty of a rare fish or an exotic coral, and this Mycedium embodies that notion all the way. Shared by SA Coralfarm, this fiery eyed is in a…
Age of Aquariums has grown the Mother of all Space Invader Pectinia
Even after all these years, the Space Invader Pectinia is such a recognizable coral in American reef aquariums that we love seeing it in diverse tanks, and especially when they are big. But no Space Invader Pectinia that we have…
Rainbow Pectinia alcicornis are totally hot this year
Rainbow Pectinia are a new breed of the once obscure group of corals which are making a big splash this year. Although corals in the wild haven’t changed, what we harvest for our reef tanks changes quite a lot and…
Two-face Australomussa has all the earmarks of a coral Chimera
The Two-face Australomussa pictured here from Reefkoi shows a remarkable pattern of color distribution so striking that it deserved to be called something special. We’ve all seen a fair amount of weird color mixing in various LPS corals, with chalice…
Top 10 new and cool corals of 2011
2011 brought us a ton of new reef fish species and although coral species and new aquairum strains come about at a crawling pace, this year was an exceptionally good one for a broad range of corals of all types.…
This Rainbow Acanthophyllia is one of the nicest we’ve ever seen
The rainbow Acanthophyllia coral we came across this weekend is one of the nicest meat corals we’ve ever seen. We spotted this gorgeous meat coral at Mile High Aquatics in Parker, Colorado and we were impressed at how this coral…
The Enduring Allure of “Chalices”: What’s the Deal?
I don’t know if it’s just one of those things that happens when you get older- you start questioning everything in the hobby: Conventions, norms, and trends are but a few of the things you ponder. I’m not grumpy, believe…
Indo-Pacific Scolymia is now officially recognized as Acanthophyllia deshayesiana
You know that coral we’ve been calling Scolymia for all these years? Well it turns out it’s not a Scolymia at all but a member of it’s own genus, Acanthophyllia. There has been confusion surrounding the true taxonomic identity of…