The thermal microenvironment of corals and the thermal effects of changing flow and radiation are critical to understanding heat-induced coral bleaching, a stress response resulting from the destruction of the symbiosis between corals and their photosynthetic microalgae. Temperature microsensor measurements at the surface of illuminated stony corals with uneven surface topography (Leptastrea pu...

Free space is necessary for larval recruitment in all marine benthic communities. Settling corals, with limited energy to invest in competitive interactions, are particularly vulnerable during settlement into well-developed coral reef communities. This situation may be exacerbated for corals settling into coral-depauperate reefs where succession in nursery microhabitats moves rapidly toward het...

Climate change scenarios predict stronger and more frequent hurricanes. We studied survival patterns of Acropora palmata during the hyper-active 2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season [AHS] to assess future effects of routinely elevated storm seasons. Before the start of the 2005 AHS, 105 colonies on three survey reefs in the EPA/NOAA Coral Reef Monitoring Project were marked and tracked through 2007. ...

Corallimorpharians (coral-like anemones) have a close phylogenetic relationship with scleractinians (hard corals) and can potentially provide novel perspectives on the evolution of biomineralization within the anthozoan subclass Hexacorallia. A survey of the transcriptomes of three representative corallimorpharians led to the identification of homologs of some skeletal organic matrix proteins (...

Global climate change (GCC) is the most widespread environmental peril facing tropical coral reefs, yet the capacity of scleractinian corals to survive the challenge is not well understood. Acclimatization is a primary mechanism by which organisms match their physiology in a timely and beneficial way to a rapidly changing environment, and so it is not surprising that the question ‘can corals ac...

The main goal of this research was to obtain baseline field data of the composition of sponges, corals, and gorgonian assemblages that can be used as a reference for future analyses of anthropogenic impact. We tested the hypothesis that relatively homogeneous and well preserved reef units can present notable natural variability in the composition of their communities which are unassociated with...

Extinction always results in loss of phylogenetic diversity (PD), but phylogenetically selective extinctions have long been thought to disproportionately reduce PD. Recent simulations show that tree shapes also play an important role in determining the magnitude of PD loss, potentially offsetting the effects of clustered extinctions. While patterns of PD loss under different extinction scenario...

Benthic macroalgae can be abundant on present-day coral reefs, especially where rates of herbivory are low and/or dissolved nutrients are high. This study investigated the impact of macroalgal extracts on both coral-associated bacterial assemblages and sublethal stress response of corals. Crude extracts and live algal thalli from common Caribbean macroalgae were applied onto the surface of Mont...

Sensitive molecular analyses show that most corals host a complement of Symbiodinium genotypes that includes thermo-tolerant types in low abundance. While tolerant symbiont types are hypothesized to facilitate tolerance to temperature and recovery from bleaching, empirical data on their distribution and relative abundance in corals under ambient and stress conditions are still rare. We quantifi...