Sandalolitha boucheti是一个新物种Fungiid石头吗coral that demonstrates the need for more basic coral species research and surveying. Seems like every week we have new species of reef fish being described but it’s much less often that we get to gawk at papers of newly described species of stonies. So farSandalolitha bouchetiis only known from the Sulawesi Sea of Northeastern Borneo and West Pacific near Vanuatu and although this is not where corals are normally collected for the aquarium trade, we can think of a few oddball coral we’ve seen from Borneo and Indonesia which look vaguely like this species.
Like other Fungiids,Sandalolitha bouchetiis approximately disc shaped when small and attached, but becomes detached and free-living later in life. The colonialSandalolitha bouchetihas multiple mouths like other species ofSandalolitha,但更微妙的特性和一个不太强劲,薄ner skeleton.Sandalolitha bouchetihas mouths evenly distributed on the surface likeS. robustawhereas inS. dentatathe mouths are concentrated near the center and its septa are all similar in size whereas these are alternating in the other two species ofSandalolitha.
Sandalolitha bouchetimay not get your heart rate up in these few single images of living and skeletal specimens but who know what other colors this species may develop, perhaps a crazy orange and green color form is out there like some of the wildCycloseris. If not, at least we now have at least one more species to consider when trying to identify that weirdo cryptic stony coral that came in on the live rock or mushroom anemone rock.
Sandalolitha bouchetiis described by Bert Hoeksema inZoosystema:Mushroom corals (Scleractinia, Fungiidae) of Espiritu Santo (Vanuatu, West Pacific) with description of a new species.
