Abstract
The family Acroporidae (Scleractinia) formerly contained four genera such as Acropora, Anacropora, Astreopora, and Montipora (for examples, Veron and Wallace 1984; Nishihira and Veron 1995; Veron 2000). Recently, Wallace et al. (2007) has elevated the subgenus Isopora, which was one of two subgenera in the genus Acropora, to genus, based on the morphological, ecological and molecular data. Then number of genera in the Acroporidae becomes five. Nevertheless, in Japan, this fact is not generally known and the genus name Acropora is still applied to the species, which should belong to the new genus Isopora. In this paper, to make public the name of the genus Isopora, and to propose the Japanese name of this genus, we summarize the morphological and ecological characters of this genus. The contents of this paper are mainly based on Wallace et al. (2007). In addition, we show morphological and ecological data from samples of Isopora that were collected in Japan. On the basis of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (Art. 69.2.2), we note that type species of Isopora is Madrepora labrosa Dana, 1846, not Astrea palifera Lamarck, 1816.
