Why o why do the majority of coral slinger still insist on calling the Indo-pacificScolymia australisby the name of a species that comes exclusively from the Middle East? I mean, it’s clear that the corals we are looking at were either collected in Australia, Indonesia or Tonga. When we had this flood of Australian brain corals we had never seen before and were still trying to sort out what was hillae, what is bowerbanki and whatever you call those weird Acan-lobo looking things, it was almost “OK” to throw out some random names as temporary placeholders. It was cute to call a coral “Acan Maxima” back when the Aussie coral hustlers were too busy unpacking and packing the treasure trove of corals from down under. It’s been three years now and we all should have collectively had the time to crack open a book that’s been around for 10 years. Sixty seconds is all it takes to turn to page 27 of the third volume of Corals of the World where you can clearly see that the realAcanthastrea maximaa) looks a lot more like aLobophylliaand b) it only comes from a narrow strip of Middle Eastern Ocean where corals haveneverbeen collected for the aquarium trade. A reef fish vendor would never take the same liberties of identifying a fish with the name of a completely different species, so why do coral pimps do it? Who knows but at this point any coral vendor that is still calling a coral by “Acan Maxima” is either lazy or woefully ignorant. The reef aquarium hobby is a civilized pastime, the information is out there, seek it.
