Red Acros are one of the rarest color forms you can find in captively grownAcropora物种,这就是为什么这样的种类ORA Red Planet,Red Dragon acro, and the raspberry red Millepora acros are so popular in a field of otherwise blue and green SPS corals. With red color being such a rarity amongAcropora, you can imagine our surprise when we came across a handful of different red strains ofAcropora在Kwajalein环礁,代表至少五种不同的物种。
我们已经告诉过你了红魔鬼Acropora Tenella.,红色形式Acropora rongelapensisand theEbeye Specialacropora microclados, but there were a few more. The video above shows a colony of Red Devil Acro which has an ‘unnatural’ red glow at the 50 foot depth where the redacropora主要是常见的。
The two other Red Acros sighted at Kwajalein included an unidentified colony which had the same red color scheme as many of the Red Devil Tenella and Red Ronggies; red branches with blue tips or growth margins and bright green polyps. This particular coral, being unidentified but otherwise not standing out as a unique species could very well be the result of hybridization, or some other poorly known phenomenon such as the coral chimera we also documented.
kwajalein红色acros的第五个菌株是一个美丽的红色acropora speciosa.这是非常罕见的,但在发现时真的很难错过。在水下共24小时,潜水和寻找酷珊瑚,我们只遇到了two红色的殖民地acropora speciosa.and these had a beautiful, rich red body and branches and elegant little yellow tips to the corallites.
Genetics is a complicated field of science and it is even more complicated when coral genetics are considered, but we do know that corals are capable of doing a lot of ‘gene mixing’ and reticulate evolution is a theory that applies particularly to corals. That said, we hazard to guess that perhaps in the central pacific ocean, including the Marshall Islands, there could be a lot of gene mixing going on to help propagate the ‘red color gene’ among a wide group of stony corals in a way which is not present in other coral regions of the world, at least not as far as red color is concerned.