Is This Coral Pocillopora acuta or a Hybrid with Seriatopora?

Hybrid reef animals are a very common sighting and it is especially well documented in the marine angelfish, clownfish, butterflyfish, surgeonfish, and basically many different families of fish but it is much less well documented or studied among the corals.…

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…

Top 5 invasive corals that border on being aquarium pests

We’re so used to thinking of corals as precious and delicate, it’s hard to imagine some of them are invasive species in our aquariums. Invasive corals in the wild are a real problem, with sun coral Tubastrea having two established species…

Pocillopora bairdi is described alongside a partial revision of the genus

Pocillopora bairdi is a new species of small polyp stony coral from the popular genus that includes the highly varied Pocillopora damicornis. This latter species is so diverse in shape, color and form that it has been quite hard to distinguish other…

Scientific research into coral farming yields new insight into the effect of flow, food and light

A recent scientific paper on coral farming was published by Zac Forsman and many colleagues on the effects of light, flow, and artificial foods on the growth of corals. The goal of the coral farming study was to see if…