[Coral-List] Dendrogyra

[Eugene Shinn]

In all my 60+ yearsdiving in the Florida Keys (starting in my senior 
year in high school(1953) I never saw a mailbox placed on pillar coral. 
Remember there were few residents in the Keys and major canal dredging 
started in the late 1950s extending into the early 1960s. I watched it 
all. Major changes began in the 1970s much of it spurred on later by 
creation of the Key Largo Coral Reef Sanctuary, the first Burger King, 
and creation of dive shops.

While doing geological research and drilling around 100  reef cores we 
never encountered Pillar coral. Living ones were rare in the 50s and 60s 
and were never considered significant reef builders. They never could 
have created significant habitat for reef fishes or other reef fauna. I 
have photographed large ones on Jamaican reefs but I can not speak for 
the rest of the Caribbean.Nevertheless, I seriously doubt they have ever 
been significant reef builders anywhere in the Caribbean. They also do 
not appear in exposures of Pleistocene coral reefs. You will not see 
them in the beautiful exposures of reef limestone in the Florida Keys 
Fossil reef quarry on Windley key.Gene