Author: Andrew Baird *This article was originally written for the Norfolk Island's Reef website. As adults, corals are sedentary or sessile animals, meaning that they are attached to the ocean floor. One consequence of being sessile is that they cannot move to find a mate with which to reproduce. When the time comes to breed … Continue reading Coral mass spawning explained

Coral Finder 2021 (CF2021) is a significant milestone for all those interested in coral identification. For the first time since the molecular revolution threw coral taxonomy into a state of chaos, there is now a guide that summarises all the changes at the family and genus level in a single publication. Russell Kelley, author of … Continue reading Review for Coral Finder 2021

You can access the reply here. They accept that their work will need to be repeated using the approach outlined in Bonito et al. 2021 i.e. test all nominal species in the genus Galaxea using vouchered topotypes. Knowing where to look for topotypes will soon become much easier once Project Phoenix finish compiling a nomenclature for the … Continue reading Wepfer et al. (2021) have now written a reply to Bonito et al. (2021)

Author: Andrew Baird The Project Phoenix Townsville + Sydney + Perth crew ran a workshop on the use of nomenclatures in taxonomy on 19th February 2021. The workshop outlined how to put together a useful nomenclature and how to use a nomenclature to progress coral taxonomy. The bottom line is that working within the “accepted” … Continue reading Workshop on the use of nomenclatures in taxonomy

Victor Bonito, Andrew Baird, Tom Bridge, Peter Cowman, and Doug Fenner recently published a Letter to the Editor on Wepfer et al. (2020) re-iterating why the current accepted coral taxonomy is not the place to begin when examining species boundaries or evolutionary relationships in scleractinian corals. They highlighted how the taxonomic value of the study … Continue reading Types, topotypes and vouchers are the key to progress in coral taxonomy: Comment on Wepfer et al. (2020)

In an interview with the Strasbourg Zoological Museum (Musée Zoologique de Strasbourg), Andrew Baird discusses why museum visits are such an essential part of taxonomic research. Watch the video on their Facebook page. Thank you Musée Zoologique de Strasbourg for having us! [Image: Strasbourg Zoological Museum] [Image: Strasbourg Cathedral]