There’s an early front-runner for this year’s Coral Of The Year award… this Favites, procured from Northern Australia by Monsoon Aquatics.
I’d wager this is Favites pentagona, or, at least, what aquarists typically identify as that species.…

There’s an early front-runner for this year’s Coral Of The Year award… this Favites, procured from Northern Australia by Monsoon Aquatics.
I’d wager this is Favites pentagona, or, at least, what aquarists typically identify as that species.…

The deeper reefs of the Indo-Pacific are home to a number of colorful and highly sought after anthiadines, including Odontanthias, Sacura, Tosanoides, and many Pseudanthias and Plectranthias, but one name that often gets lost in this discussion is Selenanthias.…

In 1986, a mysterious single-celled creature named Gemmocystis cylindrus was discovered living within the tissue of several different Caribbean stony corals. Nothing like it had ever been seen before in a coral, and, unlike the zooxanthellae that fuel a coral’s metabolism, this enigmatic protist had no chloroplasts.…

The Seychelles is home to a fascinating marine fauna, with somewhere around 900 reef-associated fish species documented from this small island nation. While much of this biodiversity can be found throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans, there is a noteworthy percentage that is restricted to the Western Indian Ocean.…

The discovery of a new species generally happens in one of three ways. Some are found dramatically and unexpectedly, like when the Magma Wrasse appeared a couple years back from a mesophotic undersea volcano in the Philippines.…

The Plectranthias perchlets are some of the most poorly understood reef fishes. As of mid-2018, there are 53 recognized species, but this is almost certainly a gross underestimate of their true diversity.…

“Taxonomic rankings above the level of species are ultimately arbitrary constructs—useful only insofar as they convey meaningful information about the relationships among organisms.”…

In recent years, we’ve seen the introduction of several coral species into the West Atlantic. The earliest of these, dating back to the 1940’s, was Tubastraea aurea, the Orange Sun Coral, likely brought over unintentionally on the hull of a transoceanic ship or in ballast water.…

Porcelain crabs (Porcellanidae) are all too often an overlooked part of coral reef ecosystems. This is partly by design, as most of the 100+ recognized species are cryptic in nature, either camouflaging themselves innocuously against the rocks to which they so tightly cling or mimicking any number of soft corals or sponges or anemones.…

This interesting Centropyge is doing its very best impression of the Black Pyramid Butterflyfish (Hemitaurichthys zoster)… black on the head and tail, pale in the middle. It was collected somewhere in the Java Sea (not far from where the mysterious koi Centropyge was recently found) and is clearly some sort of variant involving the Pearlscale Angelfish (C.…