Solitary scleractinian corals of the genera Heterocyathus and Heteropsammia inhabit soft marine bottoms without attaching to hard substrata. The corallums of these genera contain a coiled cavity inhabited by a sipunculan that roams the seafloor, carrying the host coral with it. The coral serves as a sturdy shelter that protects the sipunculan from possible predators. At the same time, the sipun...

Over recent decades several coral diseases have been reported as a significant threat to coral reef ecosystems causing the decline of corals cover and diversity around the world. The development of techniques that improve the ability to detect and quantify microbial agents involved in coral disease will aid in the elucidation of disease cause, facilitating coral disease detection and diagnosis,...

Populations of two coral reef shark species are declining rapidly: the pattern of decline highlights both the substantial impact of poaching on closed areas and the success of strict no-entry marine protected areas in maintaining healthy shark populations.

Nonindigenous species invasions have caused disruptions of native communities and detrimental economic impacts to fisheries in many temperate marine areas. However, comparatively little information exists for tropical regions, and even less is known about occurrences and impacts of nonindigenous species on coral reefs. Studies in the Tropics to date have mostly been limited to surveys in harbor...

Although there is a substantial body of work on how temperature shapes coastal marine ecosystems, the spatiotemporal variability of seawater pH and corresponding in situ biological responses remain largely unknown across biogeographic ranges of tropical coral species.Environmental variability is important to characterize because it can amplify or dampen the biological consequences of global cha...

■ Abstract Reef corals (and other marine invertebrates and protists) are hosts to a group of exceptionally diverse dinoflagellate symbionts in the genus Symbiodinium. These symbionts are critical components of coral reef ecosystems whose loss during stress-related “bleaching” events can lead to mass mortality of coral hosts and associated collapse of reef ecosystems. Molecular studies have show...

The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia consists of 3200 coral reefs extended over 280,000 km. Coral reef ecosystems are areas greatly susceptible to impact of global climate change as well as other man-made influences. This creates an urgent demand for the sensor network technologies to be deployed in order to perform essential environmental monitoring and information collection. Analysis of...

Oil dispersants, the tool of choice for treating oil spills in tropical marine environments, is potentially harmful to marine life, including reef corals. In a previous study, we found that dispersed oil and oil dispersants are harmful to soft and hard coral species at early life stages. In this broader study, we employed a "nubbin assay" on more than 10 000 coral fragments to evaluate the shor...

Systematic conservation planning increasingly underpins the conservation and management of marine and coastal ecosystems worldwide. Amongst other benefits, conservation planning provides transparency in decision-making, efficiency in the use of limited resources, the ability to minimise conflict between diverse objectives, and to guide strategic expansion of local actions to maximise their cumu...

Corals are known to harbor diverse microbial communities of Bacteria and Archaea, yet the ecological role of these microorganisms remains largely unknown. Here we report putative ammonia monooxygenase subunit A (amoA) genes of archaeal origin associated with corals. Multiple DNA samples drawn from nine coral species and four different reef locations were PCR screened for archaeal and bacterial ...