This is a selection of the corals I have been working on at The Herbert Museum. Yesterday, after two long months, I finally finished identifying and cataloging the entire collection in the Herbert’s natural history store. Internet high-five, everyone!

The collection is an amalgam of two separate collections donated to or exchanged with the Herbert museum by other institutions. Warwick Museum traded their corals for the herbology collection that was kept here, and Leamington Museum donated their sizable collection of about 150 corals.

In total, the Herbert’s coral collection encompasses well over 250 different specimens, spanning a massive array of genera and species. Identifying them all has been quite the undertaking, given the incredible multiplicity of corals in the wild. For example, the genus Acropora alone can be subdivided into about 400 different species. 400! Sometimes Mother Nature just doesn’t know when to give it (or my poor intern brain) a rest.

I’ve determined that the Warwick and Leamington corals that make up the bulk of the Herbert collection have primarily been sourced from the Indo-Pacific Ocean; some key localities represented include the Red Sea, Indonesia, India, Madagascar, and Australia. Some examples in the Leamington collection have also been sourced from West Central Atlantic waters, and I’ve concluded that these have been subsequent donations into the collection from other parties.

With the exception of one, all the corals in the collection are what we call ‘geologically recent’, meaning that they’re from the end of the Tertiary period (about 2.6 million years ago!) through to the Quaternary period, which spans up to the present day. These geologically recent corals fall into two orders:

• Scleractinians  
• Stolonifera

The Stolonifera are ‘soft corals’, and are some of the oldest forms of life on Earth. They range from the Cambrian period to the present and include organisms such as sea whips, sea pens, gorgonians and Tubipora. All the Stolonifera are recognizable by their 8-fold symmetry, and are therefore identified by the subclass ‘Octocorallia’.

The Scleractinians, or ‘stony corals’, are where the bulk of the Herbert collection lie. They are recognizable by their 6-fold symmetry, and so come under the subclass ‘Hexacorallia’.  There are 16 families of Scleractinians in existance today, and 14 of them are represented in the Herbert collection.

The evolution of Scleractinians from the Triassic period onward (and their inferred origin in the Permian) can be seen below. Note the lack of Tubipora as this is an Stolonifera coral.

Within the two orders of Scleractinia and Stolonifera, the majority of the corals in the Herbert collection belong to one of the following genera:

Acroporidae

• Acropora 
• Montipora

Pocilloporidae

• Pocillopora

Faviidae

• Diploria
• Platygyra

Tubiporidae

• Tubipora

The large proportion of Acropora and Montipora in the collection isn’t surprising, given that together, these genera encompass some 750-odd individual species. However, some of the Pocillopora encountered are pretty uncommon in reef groups and require very specific environments to thrive. Montipora, on the other hand, is a bit of a pioneer genus and is far more hardy and resilient to environmental fluctuations and change. This is why it’s common to find Montipora in aqua-cultures and aquariums, while its sister taxa, Acropora, is far more sensitive and difficult to rear in an aqua-culture, and wouldn’t survive.

And as for the one coral that isn’t geologically recent? That one is a fossil coral from the order Tabulata - an order of corals that became extinct at the end of the Permian period, over 251 million years ago.

If that wasn’t quite cool enough for you, some of the more fascinating finds in the Herbert’s collection also include:

• A piece of Acropora palmata, or Caribbean elkhorn coral, a critically endangered red-listed species of coral which has been declining in numbers for the last 30 years. Once the most abundant species of coral in the Caribbean, a whopping 98% of its total population has been wiped out over the last three decades by an aggressive disease called white pox. For years, the origin of this disease has been a mystery to marine biologists, but in recent months the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia has begun to shed light on the enigma surrounding the devastating pathogen. If you’re a science bod, you can read more about this disease here.

• A specimen of Symphyllia - an extremely rare and sought after coral in the aquarium community with an amazing potential for use in bio-medicines. The species produces a mucus which makes it incredibly resistant to disease. This mucus is being cultured by bio-engineers and chemists to produce new and effective treatments for cancer, HIV and bacterial infections that are becoming increasing resistant to conventional antibiotics.