Talk:Brain coral

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Resources[edit]

--User:Spaully (talk) 10:17, April 15, 2007

Write through desireable?[edit]

I don't want to accuse anybody of copy/paste plagiarism. However, some of the content in this article is substantially identical to material on the Monterey Bay Aquarium's website. I can't tell which came first, but (for instance) the statement, found in both sources, that the coral relies on "brawn"--a beautifully apt and descriptive word choice--must be the product of its author's particular fancy, and unlikely to appear in two independently written articles. Rangergordon (talk) 10:59, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Faviidae vs Mussidae[edit]

The current lead (along with the rest of the text) is wrong:

Brain coral is a common name given to corals in the family Mussidae, so called due to their generally spheroid shape and grooved surface which resembles a brain. [...] one of the most common genera, Favia, [...] The genus and species have not been defined through the scientific classification segment.

Previously, this was the article for "Faviidae", but (since some iconic faviids are typified by meanderoid submassive morphology which somewhat resembles the gyri and sulci of the human neocortex) used an informal common nickname "brain coral" for the title. Recently, most of the former faviids (including Favites and the iconic "brain corals" like Goniastrea and Platygyra) have been reclassified into the pre-existing family Merulinidae (which already included at least a couple species with meanderoid morphology). However, the type-genus Favia (which didn't have meanderoid morphology anyway although at present it is accompanied still by e.g. Diploria labyrinthiformis) has been reclassified into a new subfamily ("Faviinae") of Mussidae (a family that was traditionally known for fleshy large-polyp corals).

Hence, recently Cwmhiraeth has naively replaced "Faviidae" with "Mussidae" in the text, resulting in paragraphs of nonsense. The common name "brain coral" is really not applicable to the family Mussidae (nor was it ever wholly applicable to Faviidae, and Merulinidae is not much better), Favia is not currently considered part of the same family as the (sic) "brain corals", and the genera list is totally wrong. Either get rid of this article entirely (letting it be replaced with ones that better follow the current taxonomy, such as Mussidae, Merulinidae and possibly Faviina) or make it about corals with a meanderoid morphology (not a taxonomic clade). Cesiumfrog (talk) 00:35, 25 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Well, having become aware that Faviidae was no longer acceptable and was considered a synonym of Mussidae, I did go about changing it in many articles. I am sorry if I have inadvertently introduced errors. Personally I would not choose to have an article called "Brain coral". It is difficult for Wikipedia to keep up and deal with changes in taxonomy. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 05:08, 25 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Incidentally, Veron "Corals of the World" vol.3 p.461 section "Common names" defines "Brain coral: Symphyllia, Platygyra, Leptoria". (This is the bible of traditional coral taxonomy.) Cesiumfrog (talk) 04:18, 28 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I will remove the dubious tag. 185.103.110.204 (talk) 10:34, 14 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]