Places

Pseudojuloides polackorum is the newest species of pencil wrasse from South Africa

The genus Pseudojuloides constitutes a collection of fusiform torpedo shaped wrasses with chisel like incisiform teeth that are more often found living in lose sandy rubble instead of the usual coral cover. Pseudojuloides was last revised in 1981 where five new…

Centropyge abei and Chaetodon smithi: Black and yellow superstars of Waikiki

If you ever visit Hawaii and don’t stop by the Waikiki aquarium, consider yourself a felon and a convicted criminal for breaking the fish geek code. In a small public aquarium within the Waikiki neighbourhood of Honolulu lives two mega superstars of…

Steinhart Aquarium’s Caribbean display is a truly realistic representation of a biotope

Few set ups truly elicit fascination and marvel quite like those done in a biotope fashion. A biotope refers to an area of uniform environmental conditions which provides a specific niche for a particular set of organisms. Because aquarists are spoilt for choice…

Happy Taxonomist Appreciation Day!

Today, March 19th is Taxonomist Appreciation Day. This rather obscure day may not sound familiar to everyone, but it should, and hopefully it will gain a stronger following in the years to come. Today we say thank you in appreciation…

Hybrid flasher wrasses abound at Triton Bay’s Flasher Beach

When it comes to reef fish, Gerald Allen is a world renowned ichthyologist, diver and all around messiah of all marine fishes. So when Dr. Allen writes a rave review about a particular place in the world, you better take…

New island in Tonga will be a front row seat to reef development

Earlier this year a volcanic eruption began forming a new island in Tonga and it’s fairly substantial in size, considering how little time it took to form. At almost a mile long and half a mile wide, this virgin island…

Aberrant Ctenochaetus binotatus shows up with patchy skin coloration

Another surgeonfish has been collected in the wild with the strange piebald coloration that seems to be pretty common in wild surgeonfish and now we’re really getting anxious to know what this condition is, or what causes it. The genus Ctenochaetus is…

Video of crazy, never ending coral field in Japan

There’s a lot of coral awesomeness in Japan, for some reason it is home to the northernmost coral reef ever found, as well as one of the single largest coral colonies yet documented. And here again we have procured this…

PNG’s Pictichromis aurifrons from Milne Bay show a gradient of color patterns

Dottybacks are some of the quintessential reef fish; they are small, hardy, come in a myriad of colors and they are both readily available and affordable to aquarists. The other feature of dottybacks is how amenable they have been to captive…

Stunning new species of Trimma dwarf gobies described from Papua New Guinea

There’s a fresh new crop of newly described species of Trimma dwarf gobies from Papua New Guinea and several of them are quite the lookers. The four new species described by Gerald Allen include Trimma abyssum, T. nauagium, T. chledophilum and T. multiclitellum. As you…