Credits for Coralpedia

A guide to Caribbean corals, octocorals and sponges

Professor Charles Sheppard
University of Warwick
Charles.Sheppard@warwick.ac.uk

For many general comments and taxonomic advice (sometimes extensive) I am grateful to Prof Nancy Knowlton, Dr Judy Lang, Dr Doug Fenner, Prof Ernesto Weil, Prof Sven Zea, Prof Rolf Bak, Dr Juan Armando Sánchez, Dr Emre Turak.

Views on correct identification sometimes differed, in which case I found a resolution, which may of course change again later.

Coral names follow those listed as ‘Accepted’ in ‘World Register of Marine Species’, or ‘WoRMS’ (Boxshall, G. et al 2013). (No distinction is made here between the word ‘Accepted’ being in black or grey font.)

New genetic work (which is more fully followed by, for example, the AGRRA programme) indicates that several new revisions may be required shortly, but chosing a ‘standard’ means that consensus is not always met and in cases where species are not specifically renamed in the WoRMS database, they are left as they were in Coralpedia v1. There do seem to be some complications in WoRMS too, however, such as with Diploria strigosa, which the new genetic work says is and Pseudodiploria strigosa, which are both recorded as ‘accepted’ names. (In this case the older name as used in v1 is retained, at least for the time being.) Where AGRRA uses a different name (usually based on recent genetic work) this is noted in the text for that species.

Another benefit of Coralpedia v2 is that records are easily updated, changed or corrected.

Photos were taken by Charles Sheppard or Anne Sheppard except where initials appear in a corner of the images, as follows:

DF Douglas Fenner
EW Ernesto Weil
JF Joao Faria
JS Juan Sanchez
PF Pedro Rodrigues Frade
SZ Sven Zea

Spanish translations were done by Dr Rodolfo Rioja-Nieto, University of Warwick, UK. The website for this online version was designed by Kent Widman, Sarah Holtz, and Elizabeth Widman.

A grant from the Darwin Initiative funded Coralpedia v2.0, a timely improvement on Coralpedia v1.0 which was funded by a grant from the UK’s Overseas Territories Environment Programme (OTEP). Further, many of the illustrations were taken during another earlier OTEP-funded project connected with marine protected areas of the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla, and visits to Bermuda, Mexico and other Caribbean islands.

Feedback and expansion

Until recently, for many species, too few photographs exist of good enough quality, especially of soft corals and sponges. This has been rectified significantly since Coralpedia v1 by the following websites (apologies for omissions):