Coral “toolkit” discovered, tells corals when to “build” skeletons

When coral release larvae, they don’t yet have that reef-building skeletal structure and at some point, they know when its time to settle down and start building. Researchers at the University of Hawaii at Monoa, Rutgers University and the University of Haifa have just…

Homophyllia steals bowerbanki and hillae away from Acanthastrea

Homophyllia bowerbanki is the new name for both corals we once called Acanthastrea hillae and A. bowerbanki. Amid the reshuffling of Micromussa lordhowensis and Australophyllia wilsoni into their new respective categories, the new analysis now places the corals once known…

Comiquarium coral care comics are way beyond cute

Artist Raymond Wibowos CORAL SPECIES series has to be one of the cutest ways to learn coral care. Raymond started the educational comic series on his Instagram account @Comiquarium and we’ve been hooked ever since. The Bubble Coral, Plerogyra sinuosa was the first…

From the archives: What interested you the most in 2015?

This past year we continued to see strong and steady growth in visitors to the website and thank each and every one of you for coming back time and time again. We decided to drill down into our website traffic…

Top 7 new coral species of 2015

2015 was a record-setting year for new species of corals, not in terms of the number of new descriptions, but in sheer biological extremes and new discoveries. There were far more new species of reef fish described in 2015, but…

Crop circle of Fungia fralinae found in Menjangan Island, Indonesia

Fungia is a genus of mushroom or disc coral found throughout the Indo Pacific. Fungia fralinae is a particularly recognizable member of this genus which can be found in bright pink, purple, red and yellow, and some color forms are commonly known as wagon wheel fungia. Fungia corals…

In the Seychelles, scientists are getting help from nature’s cleanup crew

An innovative new technique for cleaning farmed corals is giving researchers more time on the reefs and less time scrubbing. Inspired by nature, researchers in the Seychelles have found that by sending corals to the ‘cleaners’ before transplanting them to…

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…

14 Pinterest boards to follow for aquarium inspiration

Pintrest is a visual discovery tool containing all sorts of ideas for everything from Cooking, DIY, Cars and yes even Reef Tanks. We’ve come up with 14 Pintrerest boards you can follow for inspiration in your home reef tank 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…