A cross-ocean comparison of responses to settlement cues in reef-building corals
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Climate Change Biology, Ecology, Marine Biology, Natural Resource Management
- Keywords
- 18S rRNA, crustose coralline algae, settlement cues, meta-barcoding, OTU, coral recruitment
- Copyright
- © 2014 Davies et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. A cross-ocean comparison of responses to settlement cues in reef-building corals. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e264v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.264v1
Abstract
Caribbean coral reefs have deteriorated substantially over the past 30 years, which is broadly attributable to the effects of global climate change. In the same time, Indo-Pacific reefs maintain higher coral cover and typically recover rapidly after disturbances. This difference in reef resilience is largely due to much higher coral recruitment rates in the Pacific. We hypothesized that the lack of Caribbean coral recruitment might be explained by diminishing quality of settlement cues and/or impaired sensitivity of Caribbean coral larvae to those cues, relative to the Pacific. To evaluate this hypothesis, we assembled a collection of bulk samples of reef encrusting communities, mostly consisting of crustose coralline algae (CCA), from various reefs around the world and tested them as settlement cues for several coral species originating from different ocean provinces. Cue samples were meta-barcoded to evaluate their taxonomic diversity. We observed no systematic differences either in cue potency or in strength of larval responses depending on the ocean province, and no preference of coral larvae towards cues from the same ocean. Instead, we detected significant differences in cue preferences among coral species, even for corals originating from the same reef. We conclude that the region-wide disruption of the settlement process is unlikely to be the major cause of Caribbean reef loss. However, due to their high sensitivity to the effects of climate change, shifts in the composition of CCA-associated communities, combined with pronounced differences in cue preferences among coral species, could substantially influence future coral community structure.
Author Comment
This submission has been submitted, reviewed and resubmitted to PeerJ for publication.
Supplemental Information
Cue rarefaction analysis
Rarefaction analysis of sequence coverage. Average number of OTUs identified in each cue sample at various coverage depths (number of reads).