Paracirrhites arcatus, the Arc-eye Hawkfish, is a common species on Indo-Pacific reefs, occurring along the African coastline all the way to the isolated islands of Hawaii and French Polynesia.…
Joe Rowlett
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Two New Species of Striped Lipogramma Basslets
Is there a finer way to awaken on a frigid Tuesday morn than the sight of two brand new species of basslet having been described… I think not. Let’s take a brief moment to meet Lipogramma barrettorum and L.…
A Bounce Plate Coral?
The first time I saw these photos I had no idea what I was looking at. This coral sort of looks like a Bubbletip Anemone, but the details aren’t quite right for it to be Entacmaea. The surface texture of the tentacles is different, and a few even seem to be branched.…
Top Ten Fish Discoveries Of 2017
Every year brings with it a host of interesting new discoveries when it comes to coral reef fishes, and 2017 certainly had its share. I discussed some of the year’s most exciting new fish species in a previous article, and, for this one, we’ll relive all the interesting interspecies hybrids, phenotypic aberrations, and notable range expansions that were documented for the very first time.…
New Study: Live Rock Doesn’t Really Denitrify
The bane of most aquarists is the slow buildup of organic wastes in the form of nitrate. This is Aquarium Keeping 101—cellular respiration creates ammonia, which gets broken down into nitrite, which gets broken down into nitrate. And this end product,...
Top Ten New Fish Species From 2017
As 2017 draws to a close, let’s take a look back upon what was another exhilarating year in fish. Over the past twelve months, more than eighty new species of tropical fishes were described from shallow marine environments.…
Cirrhilabrus greeni, The New Sunset Fairy Wrasse From Australia
The remote reefs off Northern Australia have yielded yet another new species of fairy wrasse with the description of Cirrhilabrus greeni. This exciting discovery comes courtesy of the collectors at Monsoon Aquatics, the same group that brought us the Monsoon Fairy Wrasse (C.…
Three New FAMILIES Of Soft Corals From South Africa!
Soft coral classification just went crazy. In a new study published in Zootaxa, South Africa’s largely endemic alcyonarian fauna was finally revised, resulting in the description of four new species… plus four newly recognized genera… and three (3!)…
Frogspawn & Hammer Corals (Might) Have A New Name
Coral taxonomy has been changing at a blistering pace in the past few years, all thanks to advancements in our understanding of the group’s complex evolutionary history. The introduction of genetic data has been key to these new insights, and now the latest group to undergo the nomenclatural knife is Euphyllia, a genus of large-polyped stony corals that should be familiar to any reef aquarist.…
Two New Species Of Pencil Wrasses (Pseudojuloides)
There was a time, not long ago, when Pseudojuloides cerasinus was considered a widespread species occurring all across the Indo-Pacific, from Africa in the west to Hawaii in the east. To be fair, this complex is remarkably homogenous in its morphology across this vast expanse of ocean, but as more data has been collected (both genetic and phenotypic, from diver and aquarium photography) it became obvious that a multitude of geographically restricted species were present.…