File this under the “Well that’s rather embarrassing!” category of errors, we recently discovered a misspelling in our own CORALexicon (CORAL‘s lexicon of reef and science jargon) in the May/June 2024 issue!
The correct spelling of “mesogloea” is in fact “mesoglea”. We all missed it, and to make the error even more egregious, we got it right in prior editions of the lexicon! Our apologies to any of our readers who were confused by our mistake.
Past definitions we’ve used for mesoglea now include:
- The “middle jelly” in coral tissue, filling the space between outer cell layer (ectoderm) and inner cell layer (endoderm) and giving a soft coral its form or shape.
- The extracellular matrix found in cnidarians such as coral or jellyfish that functions as a hydrostatic skeleton.