Cyphastrea is the perfect aquarium coral

Cyphastrea is a unique group of reef corals which are nearly ‘perfect’ residents of home reef aquariums. This primarily encrusting coral is colorful, incredibly hardy, and it grows unbelievably fast, even under a wide range of conditions. The meteor shower…

How to build a coral reef using frag plugs and empty bottles

Take one look at your reef tank and you won’t have to look far to find a frag plug. While most of our corals come on ceramic discs or squares, frag plugs come in all shapes and sizes. Frag plugs…

Unseen Corals: Orange Lobactis scutaria sighted at Quality Marine

Orange is one of the most highly sought-after coral colors for the aquarium hobby, we collectively freak out when any type of coral is discovered in orange garb. We’ve featured so many different orange coral ‘firsts’ over the years, including…

‘Project Coral’ fundraising event slated for November 14 at UK’s Charterhouse Aquatics

Project Coral has been a creative and revolutionary project spearheaded by Jamie Craggs curator of the UK’s Horniman Aquarium and they are hosting a fundraising event on November 14 to ensure the project continues. You may recall, Project Coral is behind the…

Awesome Fish Spotlight: Cirrhilabrus roseafascia from the Coral Sea

Among the two dozen or so most commonly encountered fairy wrasses, the elusive rose banded fairy wrasse, Cirrhilabrus roseafascia is not among them. This species is a relative newcomer to the documented fairy wrasse group, having only been described in 1982.…

Survival of the Fittest of Aquarium Corals

To paraphrase what Charles Darwin wrote approximately 150 years ago, survival of the fittest is the process of natural selection that allows living things to have the greatest likelihood for producing successful copies of itself in the future.  So I’m guessing…

Unseen corals: Plerogyra discus, the lovechild of fox and bubble corals

Plerogyra discus is a very unusual ‘species’ of coral which could be entirely real, or it could be the figment of one coral taxonomist’s imagination. If you don’t know already, fox corals (Nemenzophyllia) and bubbles corals (Plerogyra) are closely related and…

Unseen Corals: The square fossils of Goniophyllum

Ever since our visit to the vast coral collections at the Smithsonian Institution, we’ve had our mind on all the “unseen coral” species out there, living and fossil. We think we know a lot about coral but really, the aquarium hobby…

German artist exhibits full-scale panoramic display of Great Barrier Reef

A German artist has turned a former gas storage tower into a full-scale, 360-degree panoramic display of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Located in Leipzig, Berlin-based artist Yadegar Asisi projects a visual panorama on a a giant circular screen inside the…

There’s probably more than one species of blue ridge coral, Heliopora

Blue ridge coral, Heliopora coerulea, is a unique species of coral in the wild and in the aquarium.Despite being extremely widespread and common on wild reefs, for some reason blue ridge coral is pretty rare in aquariums, even though it is a…