[Coral-List] Do coral studies lack crucial species information??

Sat Aug 18 01:20:10 UTC 2018

Vassil,
    Thank you for this informative post.  I agree about Caribbean corals.
It has been a long time since I worked on Caribbean corals, I was
forgetting, but I remember now that you mention it, that they are not as
simple as often made out to be.  You are quite right about the high levels
of variation in some species and intermediates, and bimorphic colonies.
You pointed those things out in your book on the Scleractinians of Cuba,
and it seems to have been largely ignored, maybe in part because it was a
hard book to get and many of us are not good enough at French.  But also
they are difficult questions and it is much easier to forget the problems
and just pigeonhole the species.  I myself used intermediates and bimorphic
colonies to argue that Colophyllia natans and Colpophyllia breviserialis
are not two species but one.  They differ only in the length of the
valleys, and I found colonies with intermediate length valleys, and other
colonies that had long valleys on part of the colony and short valleys on
another part of the colony, so bimorphic.
     One other important coral taxonomist in that era was Francisco
Nemenzo, at the University of the Philippines.  He named more new species
of coral than anyone else in that era.  Many, but not all, of the species
he named are still considered by some to be valid species.
    Cheers, Doug

On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 6:48 PM, Vassil Zlatarski <vzlatarski at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> This thread initiated with the imperfections in coral ID, became complex
> and went to the crisis of coral reefs.  The colleagues expressed serious
> preoccupations on different issues.  Permit me to return to the original
> theme.
>
> The coral ID is result of actions in two fields: nomenclature and taxonomy.
>
> The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature promotes stability and
> universality in the scientific names.  Its author is the International
> Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.  The Commission publishes
> Declarations and Opinions in the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature. The
> Code is available for everyone, however its usage is pending attention like
> every legal document. Lately, the Commission do not promote change of names
> when they were in use long time and are used by many people,  This is
> important for the corals because today large number of people are using
> coral scientific names.  Before any change of scientific name it is a good
> idea to consult the Code and to search about previous decisions of the
> Commission.  If necessary, it is followed by a contact with the Commission
> and a period to expect its Opinion for changing or preserving the name.  It
> is risky to avoid the issues and the procedure of nomenclature, because
> soon or later the wrongdoing would would be evident and would requires
> corrections.  Corals offer good examples and lessons due to nomenclature
> neglect.
>
> About the second, coral taxonomy,  Dennis hit the nerve. The issues of
> morphological plasticity and extraordinary variability on different levels
> of biological organization are seriously neglected.  Selective loss of
> memory (sensu Dennis) or language barrier (if you accept it as scientist's
> excuse), please, you decide,  However, let's remind that in the middle of
> the last century there were two prominent schools for coral research. The
> results of the one were summarized by Vaughan and Wells in 1943 and by
> Wells in 1956,  The contributions of the second were presented by Alloiteau
> in 1952 and 1957 and by Chevalier in 1987. J.-P. Chevalier is  the mas
> prolific fossil and extant corals scientist of all times, who made unique
> synthesis of the many aspects of Scleractinia knowledge.  The Paris coral
> school studied in great detail the micro-morphology and dedicated special
> attention to the exceptional coral variability, which is fundamental for
> species understanding and for taxon identification. Today, references and
> followers of the second school are rare... In an additional note, during
> this debate some colleagues declared that coral ID in Atlantic has no
> problems.  The number of species in Atlantic is smaller, however this was
> result of considerable lost of coral diversity in this zoogeographic
> province during geological past and what is the future potential of such
> reduced diversity?.  Furthermore, there are presence of many intermediate
> specimens between the nominal species, there are bimorphic colonies with
> characters of two species in their different parts and a documented
> acceleration of hybridization as evolutionary benefit for coral survival.
> Most frequently, the coral ID process is oriented to "see" only "clear"
> species.  What about the specimens that "do not fit in the drawers" of the
> nominal species?  This takes us to the sampling strategy and collections'
> availability. How many, for example for the large Caribbean region,
> scientific collections representing the phenotypic variability exist?  What
> about our knowledge of rest species traits like intra-colony genetic
> variability. presence of chimeras, mosaic nature, life history, etc.?
>
> This post is dedicated briefly to the original subject of the discussion.
> For the rest I deeply appreciate the collegial preoccupations.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Vassil
>
> Vassil Zlatarski
> D.Sc. (Biology), Ph.D. (Geology)
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>

-- 
Douglas Fenner
Contractor for NOAA NMFS Protected Species, and consultant
PO Box 7390
Pago Pago, American Samoa 96799  USA

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