<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10752773#post10752773 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by acrodave
both are favites not favia.It is hard to tell took me 10min of reading and pics in the bornemans book to figure it out
No offense, but Borneman would be the first to tell you that you wont be able to positively ID unless you have a skeletal specimen and are educated in coral taxonomy. Even then it's common to get stumped. If you want the best educated guess AIMS has an awesome interactive CD or at the very least we can look at Verons pics, although visually especially with favias and favites there are specie within both genera that look just like the dr F&S's coral. Virtually identical. Visually albeit very small, I can make out a slight valley inbetween each polyp which would as a misnomered general rule of thumb suggest favia, but without looking at the coralite wallse and septa, it's impossible.
Just to get an idea of how impossible unless your a skilled taxonomist check out this favia:
http://www2.aims.gov.au/coralsearch/html/501-600/Species pages/578.htm
All three pictures look like a different genera let alone specie
I see meandering coralites stuctures which walls the polyps share, I see well defined polyp structures with obvious valleys between coralite walls, then the last guy... Look at it! Looks like a flippen Ouphyllia! The middle one almost looks like a montastrea, and the first one, well looks like a cross between a favites and a platygyra.
This goes down every day, even in your own home
. Even what you think might be a standard montipora digitata one of the first corals almost every sps head starts off with may not even be a digi'! In fact I'll wager a 1/4 of them commonly seen in the hobby are not. This is a perfect example:
http://www2.aims.gov.au/coralsearch/html/401-500/Species pages/453.htm
or
http://www2.aims.gov.au/coralsearch/html/401-500/Species pages/456.htm
So basically it's what ever you trully want it to be
Unless you want to send a frag of it to Borneman, which for that trully beautifull coral at that price.... he can get his own!
-Justin
