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-Bacteria Communities are WAY More Important than Anyone Thought
Reading through different coral scientific publication, we came across one, that could be quite relevant for us reef aquarist. In this publication published in Nature, scientist from the Red Sea Research center, from the King Abdullah University of Science and…
Coral Snorkeling, Murex Bangka Back Reef
Coral Snorkeling Murex Bangka Back Reef When visiting Bangka island, you don’t have to go far to experience world-class coral snorkeling. The coral reef behind Murex Bangka Resort has an impressive diversity of marine life which is easy to spot…
Learn to Spot Six Types of Branching Coral
Six Types of Branching Coral One of the first steps to becoming a coral spotter is learning to recognize coral growth forms. An perhaps the most recognizable of them all is branching corals. But even within this recognizable group, there are…
How To Identify 20 Stony Corals From Indonesia
Often scuba divers focus on tiny critters, schools of fish, or jumbo-sized creatures like whales, dolphins, and sharks. This leaves corals to get lumped together under a single term ‘coral reef’ which is far too general to describe the hundreds of individual…
Awesome Fish Spotlight: The Ornate Butterflyfish
The Butterfly Effect We have always been told a swift “NO” on keeping most butterflyfish species in reef aquariums and it constantly reminds us of an old Mark Twain quote: “There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it…
Stylophora: Achieve that SPS Aesthetic with Less-Demanding Corals
Stylophora are branching small-polyp stony corals from the Family Pocilloporidae. Stylophora shares that family with Pocillopora and Seriatopora, and the three together are the only genera in the family. As a result of their close relationship to one another, all…
Sea Cucumber Pretends It’s A Coral
Sometimes it seems like every creature living on a coral reef has at least one species which mimics it. Take, for instance, this juvenile sea cucumber, Thelenota ananas, which has mastered the art of being Pocillopora. Question is… can it…
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…
