Coralidea llc was founded by Jake Adams to produce and distribute a free, high quality digital guide to corals. Unlike many of our marine life guides which are produced and intended for divers and naturalists, the guide produced by Coralidea llc. was designed with the aquarist in mind. Nearly all of the imagery was produced in aquaria so the images resemble the more intimate viewpoint one might experience when dealing with aquarium corals.

Producing the Coralidea guide and website has been a monumental devotion of time. Although the guide itself has been in development for just a year, the resources which led to its development have been drawn from over a decade as an active participant in the national marine aquarium community.
To begin with, images for the guide were taken on countless visits to public and private aquaria from no fewer than 10 major metropolitan areas. Many of the rare Atlantic coral images were taken over several months of diving in Puerto Rico and many necessary images were provided by aquarists from around the country.
Moreover, apart from some of the Javascript functions, the entire website was coded from scratch. All of the images had to identified, processed and formatted into the content which is now available online and in the mobile guide.

The mobile guide for iPods will be available by mid-september. Although we will try to produce an e-book (pdf) version of the guide in time for our mid-September launch, this is unlikely and the e-book will be made available as soon as possible after launch. However, the iPod version of the mobile guide will be viewable on smartphones and computers.

The cost of the mobile guides is free. All that we humbly ask is that you support the sponsors who support us.

Coralidea's mobile guides use standard image and document file formats which are nimble and interoperable by design. There is no cumbersome digital rights management and the license accompanying our products grant users full liberty to modify the content for personal use and non-commercial re-distribution. A specific list of tested devices will be made available nearing launch date.

At Coralidea we believe in Fair Use of media. Therefore, all of our content is made available for reproduction through a Creative Commons License. The Creative Commons License allows any potential user of our content to reproduce our images for non-commercial purposes, with credit to the author and without modification. For example, reef-clubs are generally non-profit organisations and even if they organise an event for this purpose of fund-raising, this is still considered non-commercial use. For further information regarding Fair Use, please visit the Creative Commons website. For inquiries regarding clarification of the criteria for Fair Use, or for commercial use of Coralidea content, please contact us via coralite at gmail dawt com.

As you can imagine, a project of this magnitude takes a lot of help and resources. I could never list off all of the persons who helped this project along but the following persons were some of the key players.

Luke Adams, Kelly Vogel, Nate Kwiatek, Gresham Hendee, Ali Atapour, Gary Madl, Kevin and Katrina Jessop, Robert Fenner, Dave Marriott, Frank Burr, Mitch Carl,

Additionally, the following persons and businesses were kind enough to allow me to photograph their aquarium corals.

Chris Cap, Steve Hurlock, Mernard, Jim Gryczanowski, Premier Fish and Reef, Exotic Aquatics, Aquatic Art Inc., Pacific Aqua Farms, Sea Dwelling Creatures, Exotic Aqua Imports, Tropical Reef Oasis, Karvin Kupfer, Louis, Neal Yahada, John McAvoy, Jess and George, Neptune's, Key's Island, Star Aquatics, FINS, Tong's, Amazing Aquariums, Reefer Madness,

The current growing Coralidea mobile guide is approaching 15MB and it should remain under 20MB by the time it is released. A file this size should download within 1-2 minutes on most modern internet connections.

Although we tried to follow taxonomical guidelines to define these chapters, we also used some discretion in giving some priority to more common and/or popular groups of corals. Some people may not agree with what defines a large or a small polyp stony coral, but at the moment we feel that this is the most elegant way to navigate all coral species.

The first iteration of the mobile Coralidea guide is not much more than a grouping of images. This format is the only way to implement this type of media on iPods although it is also viewable on any electronic device which can display images. Future versions of the mobile Coralidea guide will be in .pdf and .html formats which allow for more integration of text and dynamic display of information, including web functionality.

What, you mean you don't read Latin? In all seriousness the text is there as a placeholder while the website and mobile guides are being developed.