Author: Andrew Baird I have just returned from a research trip to Kenya. The trip included a workshop on coral taxonomy and a field trip to the coral reefs of Shimoni including a visit to Kisite Mpunguti Marine Park & Reserve. The corals of Kenya are very poorly known. To the best of my knowledge, no … Continue reading Kenya, March 2026
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Coral Taxonomy Workshop in Kenya, March 2026
Part of the mission of Project Phoenix (PP) is to give those interested in working with corals the tools to be able to identify the species they work with. Unlike my own undergraduate experience, our aim is to train participants in taxonomy rather than just specimen identification. The fact is that none of currently available … Continue reading Coral Taxonomy Workshop in Kenya, March 2026
New paper: “A nomenclature for the extant hermatypic scleractinian corals including type locations and taxonomic status for 2,338 nominal species”
Author: Andrew Baird The nomenclature recently published open-access by Crosbie et al. (2026), in the Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, provides one of the most important piece of information for testing the validity of the 2,338 current nominal species of extant hermatypic Scleractinia – the type location (for the importance of the type location, see … Continue reading New paper: “A nomenclature for the extant hermatypic scleractinian corals including type locations and taxonomic status for 2,338 nominal species”
Orpheus Island Research Station, November 2025
Author: Andrew Baird Spawning is upon us again on the Great Barrier Reef and I have just returned from a few days on Orpheus Island Research Station. I was helping Dr Carrie Sims of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute find mature Acropora colonies from which to produce planulae for her research on the early life history of … Continue reading Orpheus Island Research Station, November 2025
Acropora kalindae Crosbie, Baird, Bridge & Rassmussen, 2025
Author: Augustine Crosbie Nominal species: Acropora kalindae Crosbie, Baird, Bridge & Rassmussen, 2025 Not every species discovery begins with exploring the unknown. Sometimes it begins with realising that something familiar is not what it was thought to be. The newly described species Acropora kalindae Crosbie, Baird, Bridge & Rassmussen, 2025 described in Rassmussen et al. (2025) was for decades mistakenly called Acropora … Continue reading Acropora kalindae Crosbie, Baird, Bridge & Rassmussen, 2025
The Mentawai, October 2025
Author: Andrew Baird "A marine biologist is never on holiday" -- James Bond, the Spy Who Loved Me (1977) I have just returned from a trip to the Mentawai Islands in West Sumatra, Indonesia, in October 2025. The Mentawai Islands are one of the premier surf destinations in the world with numerous world class waves … Continue reading The Mentawai, October 2025
The Seychelles
Author: Andrew Baird Andrew, Tom and Charlotte recently returned from a sampling trip to the Seychelles hunting topotypes and attempting to sample as many different species as possible over 10 days on D’Arros Island followed by a week on Praslin and Mahe. The Seychelles is an important destination for Project Phoenix’s revision of the taxonomy … Continue reading The Seychelles
Acropora tersa Rassmussen, Bridge & Baird, 2025
Author: Sage Rassmussen Nominal species: Acropora tersa Rassmussen, Bridge & Baird, 2025 Meet Acropora tersa, a coral that you may already know. This newly described species has been hiding in plain sight for years on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and across much of the western Pacific, often mistaken for its close relative, A. hyacinthus. Its journey to a formal … Continue reading Acropora tersa Rassmussen, Bridge & Baird, 2025
New Paper: “Patterns of coral spawning in the Palm Islands, Great Barrier Reef”
Congratulation to Hanaka Mera and colleagues for a paper just published in Coral Reefs that should be of interest to everyone working on coral spawning on the Great Barrier Reef. The paper is published with open access and can be viewed here. The paper explored coral spawning patterns using over 30 years of direct coral … Continue reading New Paper: “Patterns of coral spawning in the Palm Islands, Great Barrier Reef”
New paper: “The tables have turned: taxonomy, systematics and biogeography of the Acropora hyacinthus (Scleractinia: Acroporidae) complex”
In 2020 when Project Phoenix launched this website, we promised a revolution and thanks to some excellent work led by Dr Sage Rassmussen, we have just delivered with a taxonomic revision of the Acropora hyacinthus species complex (Rassmussen et al. 2025). To quote the singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman and to paraphrase the title of the paper published in … Continue reading New paper: “The tables have turned: taxonomy, systematics and biogeography of the Acropora hyacinthus (Scleractinia: Acroporidae) complex”
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