Corals of the World. 2000. J. E. N. Veron (author) and Mary Stafford-Smith (editor and producer), Australian Institute of Marine Science, PMB 3, Townsville Mail Centre, Queensland 4810, Australia. 3 volumes, 1382 p. Email: corals@aims.gov.au; web address: http://www.aims.gov.au/corals. US$175.00 or AU$265.00 set; discounts available for conservation and research organizations; student subsidies available

Aronson, Richard B.

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Richard B. Aronson

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Review: Corals of the World by J.E.N. Veron and Mary Stafford-Smith

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Gulf of Mexico ScienceVolume 19Number 1 Number 1 Article 82001Review: Corals of the World by J.E.N. Veron andMary Stafford-SmithRichard B. AronsonDauphin Island Sea LabDOI: 10.18785/goms.1901.08Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/gomsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Gulf of Mexico Scienceby an authorized editor of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact Joshua.Cromwell@usm.edu.Recommended CitationAronson, R. B. 2001. Review: Corals of the World by J.E.N. Veron and Mary Stafford-Smith. Gulf of Mexico Science 19 (1).Retrieved from https://aquila.usm.edu/goms/vol19/iss1/8BOOK REVIEW Gulf of Mexico Science, 2001 (1), pp. 74-75 © 2001 by the Marine Environmental Sciences Consortium of Alabama Corals of the World. 2000.]. E. N. Veron (author) and Mary Stafford-Smith (editor and produc-er), Australian Institute of Marine Science, PMB 3, Townsville Mail Centre, Queensland 4810, Australia. 3 volumes, 1382 p. Email: corals@aims.gov.au; web address: http://www. aims.gov.au/ corals. US$175.00 or AU$265.00 set; discounts available for conservation andre-search organizations; student subsidies avail-able. Staghorn Corals of the World: A Revision of the Ge-nus Acropora. 1999. Carden C. Wallace, CSIRO Publishing, P.O. Box 1139, Collingwood, Vic-toria 3066, Australia; OR Antipodes Books and Beyond, Ltd., 9707 Fairway Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20901, USA. 421 p. Email: sales@publish.csiro.au; web address: http:/ I www.publish.csiro.au; OR Email: antipode@ antipodesbooks.com. AU$140.00; CD-ROM to accompany book available for AU$130.00. Learning to identifY scleractinian corals re-quires years of study, but understanding their evolutionary relationships is truly a daunting task. Those of us working on the depauperate reefs of the Caribbean have until recently so-laced ourselves with the thought that at least we did not have to learn the wildly diverse Indo-Pacific corals. Lately, however, even the Caribbean corals have become problematic. For example, morphotypes of the "species" Montastraea annulmis may in reality be mem-bers of a species complex or at least the inter-mediate products of ongoing speciation events. In Corals of the World, Charlie Veron takes on the challenge of covering all the genera of reef-building corals worldwide. This privately published, three-volume set is simply spectac-ular, with literally thousands of color photo-graphs of coral colonies at different magnifi-cations, maps of geographic distributions, and drawings of corallite morphologies. There is no doubt that this set will be the standard for reef-coral identification for decades to come. Much of the credit for its success belongs to Mary Stafford-Smith, who has done a superb job of editing and producing these volumes. Volume 1 begins with introductory sections on the ecology of coral reefs, the history of reef building through geological time, and the biology of the corals themselves. The rest of the volume is given over to the family Aero-poridae, the most diverse and numerically im-portant group of scleractinians on modern cor-al reefs. The genus Acropora alone contains 170 species in Veron's treatment. Volumes 2 and 3 cover the rest of the coral families. Those concerned about distinguish-ing members of the Montastraea annularis spe-cies complex, currently split into M. annularis, M. faveolata, and M. franksi, will not find much comfort; Veron lists only M. annulm·is and brief-ly mentions this continuing controversy in a taxonomic note. Likewise, there are three "species" of Porites from the Caribbean that have a similar, branching morphology: P. pori-tes, P. furcata, and P. divaricata. The first two species in particular remain difficult to distin-guish both in the field and under the micro-scope, and, having originally been considered forms of P. pmites, they probably should be lumped once again. These problems are not Veron's fault. We are simply up against an epistemological bar-rier when it comes to identifYing corals in cer-tain genera. Veron wraps up Volume 3 by ex-ploring the source of these ambiguities. He re-views his ideas about "reticulate evolution," the hypothesis that species complexes are formed by vicariance events but the species then exchange genetic information when their distributions overlap once more. Multiply anas-tomosing phylogenies imply that "species" of corals are something different from, say, spe-cies of mammals. Reticulate evolution could, therefore, account for the difficulties in sepa-rating coral species. A complete theoretical treatment can be found in Veron (1995). Al-though reticulate evolution sounds unlikely at first blush, it certainly should not be dismissed. Veron's set closes with keys to the genera and species at the end of Volume 3. All told, Corals of the World is a great value. Those of us who only occasionally dip our toes into the tropical Indo-Pacific can find much help with species identifications of the Carib-bean corals, and we can learn about the aston-ishing Order Scleractinia in all its Indo-Pacific glory. Carden Wallace's Staghorn CmYJls of the World is a work of equal virtuosity, although it is more of a traditional monograph. The reader will find detailed information on 113 species of Ac-·ropora, including descriptions of five new spe-cies. Each species is illustrated with excellent black-and-white photographs and a map show-1Aronson: Review: Corals of the World by J.E.N. Veron and Mary Stafford-SmiPublished by The Aquila Digital Community, 2001BOOK REVIEW 75 ing its geographic distribution. There are also 24 color plates. A CD-ROM that includes an identification guide is available separately. Wallace's taxonomic interpretations differ from those ofVeron, who lists 57 more species of Acropora. This difference is not especially rel-evant to the Caribbean coral fauna, however. It has long been common knowledge that there are three species of Acropora in the Ca-ribbean and that they are all endemic to the region. Both Wallace and Veron raise the issue that one of these, A. prolifera, is probably a hy-brid of the other two, A. palmata and A. cervi-coTnis. A number of investigators had previous-ly suspected that this was the case, and ongoing genetic analysis by Steven Vollmer, a graduate student at Harvard University, strongly sup-ports the hypothesis that A. prolifera is a hybrid. In addition to the species descriptions, Wal-lace's book contains detailed information on the physiology, reproduction, ecology, and stratigraphic ranges of Acropora spp. A section on evolutionary relationships is replete with cladistic analyses. Wallace explores phylogenet-ic hypotheses by mapping stratigraphic and biogeographic distributions onto her dado-grams. This is no mere academic exercise; Ac-1-opora is the most prominent coral genus on today's reefs. Understanding why Acmpora is ubiquitous will help us evaluate the hypothesis of reticulate evolution and answer other evo-lutionary questions about corals and associated reef organisms. The irony, of course, is that such wonderful books about reef corals are being published at a time when corals, and indeed entire reef sys-tems, are under threats ranging from bomb-fishing in Indonesia, which destroys localized patches of reef, to global warming, which seems destined to cause mass coral bleaching on a regular basis. Outbreaks of white-band disease have drastically reduced populations of Acmpora spp. in the Caribbean, and recovery, if it occurs, could take decades. The incidence of white-band disease is now increasing within populations of Acmpom in the Indo-Pacific. Ve-ron's and Wallace's books remind us of why we should care about reefs and the corals that build them. LITERATURE CITED Veron, J. E. N. 1995. Corals in space and time. Syd-ney, Australia, UNSW Press. RicHARD B. ARoNSON, Dauphin Island Sea Lab, Dauphin Island, Alabama 36528, and Depart-ment of Marine Sciences, University of South Al-abama, Mobile, Alabama, 36688 2Gulf of Mexico Science, Vol. 19 [2001], No. 1, Art. 8https://aquila.usm.edu/goms/vol19/iss1/8DOI: 10.18785/goms.1901.08Gulf of Mexico Science, 2001 (I), p. 76 REFEREES 2000-2001 Amsler, C. Angus, R. Aronson, A. Atkinson, L. Beach, K. Benfield, M. Brande, S. Broadway,]. Carney, R. Chaplin, G. Chesney, E. Cowan,]. Depaola, A. Dinnel, S. Dunton, K. Edwards, R. Foley, K. Freshwater, D. Fry, B. Greenstein, B. Griffin, R. Hamilton, P. Heath, S. Holt, S. Hubard, C. Ingram, W. Keenan, S. Lawrence,]. Leffler, D. Legeckis, R. Lindberg, W. Marion, K. Marsh, A. McCawley,]. Muller-Karger, F. Mullin, K. Neiland, D. Neer,J. Parsons, G. Patterson, W. Peterson, G. Pierson, M. Rakocinski, C. Ross, S. Secor, D. Smith, C. Stancyk, S. Stuck, K. Sutton, T. Tate, L. Thompson, B. Van Vleet, T. Valentine,]. Waddell, V. Watts, S. Welsh, S. Wibbels, T. Workman, I. 3Aronson: Review: Corals of the World by J.E.N. Veron and Mary Stafford-SmiPublished by The Aquila Digital Community, 2001

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