fed up with common names

[RyanSweatt2004]

Is any one else fed up with such loose use of common names for corals like devils hand, finger leather, and mushroom leather. There are so many online vendors miss labeling soft corals and hobbyists asking for help with Identifying their corals. I have heard devils hand be used to describe everything from many different species of lobophyton to sinularia. Most of the time its such an obvious miss use of name. Not every lobophyton or thick branching sinularia is a devils hand. I know its not always easy to tell them apart. Maybe its too much to expect but with the advancements in this hobby you think we could get some names straightened out or loose them all together in favor of scientific names. I would like to know what others think of this.

 

[Hormigaquatica]

Ideally, it would be nice to use standardized names for things. Unfortunately, its pretty tough to sort out proper nomenclature for most soft corals. Even taxonomists have a really tough time with some of them. For example, if I remember correctly, there are currently over 100 species of Sinularia listed; most agree that many of those are incorrectly assigned. Still, there obvious differences for some of the animals; it would be nice if people could use standard names at least for the ones the average hobbyist can tell apart.

 

[Apercula]

I agree that the identifying of soft corals is a problem, but I'm not sure we can be any more accurate labeling them with scientific names than we are with common names.
I received this coral as a sarcophyton.

The next week the same vendor had another one that looked nearly identical labeled as a lobophyton. The next week they had another labeled sarcophyton. Over the course of 2.5 months they had 7 or 8 corals that all looked the same with no consistency on naming, at one point they had 2 on their website at the same time with different names.

I have 8 varieties of leathers in my tank, I couldn't identify any of them to species level with certainty, and even genus level is questionable on a couple of them.

 

[MarkusII]

Hello,

full supprt

I dislike the common names of fish and Corals as well here over in Europe - ist the same problem in German, and ofter there even exist several names for one and the same fish.

Yes for a large variety it is difficult to determin exactly and find a name - but then I leave it ope as to the family name.

regards

Markus

 

[cjdevito]

While I agree with the general gist of replies to this thread (that soft coral taxonomy is a mess, real IDs at species and even sometimes family level are not always feasible for the hobbyist) there are times when the 'common name' is taken to ridiculous extremes, especially in regards to the current practice of assigning designer names to nearly everything.

Take for example sympodium. Putting aside all the dealers who completely get it's identity wrong and call it clavularia or something equally unlikely, in the short time it's been available this year it's picked up half a dozen different common names through vendors. Fortunately none of them seem to be catching on, but I've seen them listed as:

Green xenia
Steel Blue cloves
Blue Star polyps
Stargazer xenia
Star Sapphire cloves
and more.

Which is just ridiculous, just guys in their garage "shops" pulling names out of thin air in an attempt to make them more appealing.

Then again, this is an age of the hobby where people post questions about their duncans, torch corals, cyphastreas, etc in the Soft Coral Forum on a regular basis... which speaks volumes about the average hobbyists of today's knowledge of coral taxonomy and identification.