Leather corals
| Leather corals | ||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||
| Alcyoniidae | ||||||||||
| Lamouroux , 1812 |
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Leather corals (Alcyoniidae) are a family of the flower animals (Anthozoa). The species are animal colonies that consist of many individual polyps .
features
They grow branched, tree-shaped, lobed, crusty or finger-shaped. Like all animals from the lower class (Alcyonaria), the single polyp has eight feathered tentacles, and the gastric space is divided into eight chambers by eight longitudinal walls (mesenteries). In many species the colonies also have regressed tubular polyps (siphonozoids) whose job it is to pump or drain water into the body of the colony. This allows the leather corals to stretch and stabilize.
In contrast to the hard corals (Scleractinia) from the subclass Hexacorallia , leather corals do not have a solid calcareous skeleton, but mostly have small calcified needles ( sclerites ) in their bodies as strengthening elements .
Leather corals live in an endosymbiosis with unicellular, symbiotic algae ( zooxanthellae ).
They are predominantly brown, yellow or greenish in color.
distribution
Leather corals occur in the Indo-Pacific , most species live in inner reefs in warm shallow water. They tolerate the temperature fluctuations, changes in the salt content and the pH value that occur here due to the ebb tide or tropical thunderstorms, often better than stony corals (Scleractinia). Only a few species live in cold water or in the deep sea .
Many types of leather coral can be kept in saltwater aquariums and are easier to keep for beginners than hard corals . Here, too, they often reach enormous sizes.
Genera
- Acrophytum Hickson, 1900
- Alcyonium Linnaeus, 1758
- Cladiella Gray, 1869
- Drifa Danielssen, 1886
- Eleutherobia Puetter, 1900
- Litophyton Forskål, 1775
- Lobophytum Marenzeller, 1886
- Lobularia Savigny
- Malacacanthus Thomson, 1910
- Minabea Utinomi, 1957
- Paraminabea Williams & Alderslade, 1999
- Parerythropodium Kuekenthal, 1916
- Sarcophyton Lesson, 1834
- Sinularia May, 1898
- Stereonephthya
- Umbellulifera Thomson & Dean, 1931
- Verseveldtia Williams, 1990
literature
- K. Fabricius & P. Alderslade: Soft Corals and Sea Fans. 2001, Australian Institute of Marine Science. ISBN 0-642-32210-4
- KORALLE, marine aquaristic specialist magazine, No. 29 October / November 2003, Natur und Tier Verlag Münster, ISSN 1439-779X
