Developing best practices for the restoration of massive corals and the mitigation of predation impacts: influences of physical protection,colony size,and genotype on outplant mortality

Coral Reefs - Coral reefs have undergone drastic declines due to anthropogenic and natural disturbances. In response, restoration efforts were developed to recover lost ecosystem services....     

Species traits as indicators of coral bleaching

Coral Reefs - Coral bleaching as a response to increased sea surface temperature is regularly surveyed, but our understanding of species-specific differences in response is limited. We compiled...     

Cross-generational heritability analysis of physiological traits in Porites astreoides across an inshore-offshore gradient in the Lower Florida Keys

Coral Reefs - Estimating the heritable genetic variation in fitness-related traits is key to projecting the adaptive evolution of organisms in response to a changing environment. While heritability...     

Ecological consequences of Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease in the Turks and Caicos Islands

Coral Reefs - Coral reefs are suffering global declines due to climate change, natural disasters, pollution, and diseases. Coral disease events have increased in frequency and severity in the past...     

Polyp dropout in a solitary cold-water coral

Coral Reefs - Scleractinian corals feature both sessile and mobile stages and diverse modes of development. In some cases, development can be reversed. Examples include polyp detachment in response...     

Prevalence and extent of coral diseases in shallow and mesophotic reefs of the Southwestern Atlantic

Coral Reefs - Coral reef ecology has advanced in many fields, but disease patterns across depth gradients remain unclear. By comparing the prevalence and extent of bleaching and diseases in 160...     

Heat stress differentially impacts key calcification mechanisms in reef-building corals

Coral Reefs - Coral reefs are increasingly threatened by climate change, mass bleaching events and ocean acidification (OA). Coral calcification, a process that is critical to build and maintain...     

Priority coral conservation areas under global warming in the Amami Islands,Southern Japan

Coral Reefs - Coral reef ecosystems are highly sensitive to climate change. The Amami Islands in Southern Japan were selected as the study area. It is important to select areas that should be given...     

Simulating the effects of colony density and intercolonial distance on fertilisation success in broadcast spawning scleractinian corals

Coral Reefs - Coral reefs are predicted to be vulnerable to the Allee effect due to the density dependence of broadcast spawning fertilisation success. Verifying such effects in corals, however, is...     

Algae dictate multiple stressor effects on coral microbiomes

Coral Reefs - Most studies of stressors focus on the response of traditionally classified organisms via effects on growth, mortality or physiology; however, most species have microbial associates...     

Workshop on the ecosystem and fisheries of the Coral Sea: an Australian perspective on research and management

This report summarizes a workshop on the Coral Sea to determine key research findings and identify the research gaps needed to support sustainable management of a proposed Coral Sea Marine Reserve. Key research questions included determining the connectivity of apex predators with the broader southwest Pacific Ocean, and assessing the regions?? biodiversity in relation to seabed topography and oceanographic processes. The workshop concluded noting the importance of engaging surrounding countries in maintaining the sustainability and uniqueness of the Coral Sea.     

Variation in susceptibility among three Caribbean coral species and their algal symbionts indicates the threatened staghorn coral,Acropora cervicornis,is particularly susceptible to elevated nutrients and heat stress

Coral Reefs - Coral cover is declining worldwide due to multiple interacting threats. We compared the effects of elevated nutrients and temperature on three Caribbean corals: Acropora cervicornis,...     

How Symbiodiniaceae meets the challenges of life during coral bleaching

Coral Reefs - Coral health depends on a fragile partnership between the coral hosts and the endosymbiotic dinoflagellate symbionts. Sequence-level omics techniques are revolutionizing many aspects...     

Three decades of recurrent declines and recoveries in corals belie ongoing change in fish assemblages

Coral Reefs - Coral reefs are increasingly being altered by a myriad of anthropogenic activities and natural disturbances. Long-term studies offer unique opportunities to understand how multiple...     

Carbohydrate composition of mucus from scleractinian corals from the central Red Sea

Coral Reefs - Coral mucus is continuously released by most corals and acts as an important protective barrier and as a substrate for host-associated microbial communities due to its complex...     

Oxygen: the universal currency on coral reefs

Coral Reefs - Coral reefs are suffering unprecedented declines worldwide. Most studies focus on stressors such as rising temperatures, nutrient pollution, overfishing, and ocean acidification as...     

Strategies for integrating sexually propagated corals into Caribbean reef restoration: experimental results and considerations

Coral Reefs - Caribbean hard coral cover has decreased by more than 80% in the last 40 years. In response, active coral restoration has grown in popularity as a management tool to sustain...     

Sea-surface temperature and thermal stress in the Coral Triangle over the past two decades

Increasing ocean temperature has become one of the major concerns in recent times with reports of various related ecological impacts becoming commonplace. One of the more notable is the increased frequency of mass coral bleaching worldwide. This study focuses on the Coral Triangle region and utilizes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-Coral Reef Watch (NOAA-CRW) satellite-derived sea surface temperature (SST) and Degree Heating Weeks (DHW) products to investigate changes in the thermal regime of the Coral Triangle waters between 1985 and 2006. Results show an upward trend in SST during this period with an average rate of 0.2°C/decade. However, warming within this region is not uniform, and the waters of the northern and eastern parts of the Coral Triangle are warming fastest. Areas in the eastern part have experienced more thermal stress events, and these stress events appear to be more likely during a La Niña.     

Mixed Layer Depth Seasonality within the Coral Sea Based on Argo Data

The worldwide deployment of Argo floats has enabled much more detailed studies of global and regional seas over the last decade. Here, the seasonal variability of the mixed layer depth (MLD) within the Coral Sea was examined with CTD profiles from Argo floats. Multiple threshold values for both temperature and density have been employed to determine the most suitable threshold values for the Coral Sea. A threshold value of 0.04 kg/m³ for density and 0.2°C for temperature appear the most fitting for this region. Although MLD and isothermal layer depth (ILD) coincide quite well in most cases, the relatively common presence of temporary, non-seasonal barrier layers induces an ILD that is significantly deeper than the MLD. Consequently, an MLD estimation based on density is more appropriate. A distinct seasonality in the MLD is evident throughout the Coral Sea, but is generally more pronounced in higher southern latitudes (20–30°S). Salinity inversions are rare and mainly occur in the south-eastern Coral Sea, while barrier layers are more commonly associated with the north-eastern Coral Sea, a region characterised by high rainfall. The significance of regional currents is evident in the north-western Coral Sea, where temperature and ocean heat content is relatively low due to a northward moving boundary current. Shallow bathymetry, in turn, is linked to the absence of Argo data on the continental shelf and in the central Coral Sea.     

Contact with turf algae alters the coral microbiome: contact versus systemic impacts

Coral Reefs - Coral reefs are degrading to algae-dominated reefs worldwide, with alterations of coral microbiomes commonly co-occurring with reef demise. The severe thermal anomaly during the 2016...