Red Acros are one of the rarest color forms you can find in captively grownAcropora物种,这就是为什么诸如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 ofAcroporaat Kwajalein Atoll which represented at least five different species.
我们已经告诉过您有关红魔鬼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通常经常看到。
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 Red Acros的第五株是美丽的红色Acropora Speciosa这是非常罕见的,但是当发现它时很难错过。总共花了24小时的水下,潜水和寻找凉爽的珊瑚,我们只遇到two红色的殖民地Acropora Speciosaand 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.