About

This site is to help people who want to identify hard, stony corals to growth form (English et al., 1997) or to Genus level (Veron, 2000). The work here was initially set up through a Flickr album, but the changes in Flickr has somehow disabled all of the links and searches associated with that work.

The intention is for this resource to used by anyone who is interested in knowing more about the corals that are the foundation of coral reefs. Hopefully, researchers and volunteers reef surveyors alike will find this useful. The hope is that this format is intuitive, but (being an ancient computer dinosaur) constructive feedback is always welcome 🙂

Note that there have a some revisions to the Genus names of some of the tropical corals (see Huang et al., 2011 and 2014). This will take me some time to adapt to.

References:

English, S., C. Wilkinson and V. Baker, 1997. Survey Manual for Tropical Marine Resources 2nd ed. ASEAN-Australia Marine Science Project: Living Coastal Resources, Australian Institute of Marine Science, PMB No. 3, Townsville Mail Centre, Australia 4810, 390p.

Veron, J.E.N. 2000. Corals of the world. Vol 1-3. M. Stafford-Smith (Ed.) Australian Institute of Marine Science, Townsville, Australia. 1382p. (Note: the link is to the online version of the books. You can still get the hardcopies if you prefer, from online retailers like Amazon.)

Huang D, Licuanan WY, Baird AH, Fukami H (2011). Cleaning up the ‘Bigmessidae’: molecular phylogeny of scleractinian corals from Faviidae, Merulinidae, Pectiniidae and Trachyphylliidae. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 11: 37.

Huang D, Benzoni F, Fukami H, Knowlton N, Smith ND, Budd AF (2014). Taxonomic classification of the reef coral families Merulinidae, Montastraeidae, and Diploastraeidae (Cnidaria: Anthozoa: Scleractinia). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 171: 277–355.