Coral recruitment was examined on terracotta tiles deployed for four six-month periods between March 2001 and April 2003 on the West Fore Reef at Discovery Bay, Jamaica. During each sampling period, four tiles were deployed on each of two arrays at six depths ranging from 3 m to 33 m. Only three Acropora spat recruited to the tiles over the sampling period. The Acropora spat recruited during on...

BACKGROUND Climate-induced coral bleaching poses a major threat to coral reef ecosystems, mostly because of the sensitivities of key habitat-forming corals to increasing temperature. However, susceptibility to bleaching varies greatly among coral genera and there are likely to be major changes in the relative abundance of different corals, even if the wholesale loss of corals does not occur for...

Increasing frequency and severity of disturbances is causing global degradation of coral reef ecosystems. This study examined temporal changes in live coral cover and coral composition in the central Maldives from 1997 to 2016, encompassing two bleaching events, a tsunami, and an outbreak of Acanthaster planci. We also examined the contemporary size structure for five dominant coral taxa (tabul...

The three-dimensional form of a coral reef develops through interactions and feedbacks between its constituent organisms and their environment. Reef morphology therefore contains a potential wealth of ecological information, accessible if the relationships between morphology and ecology can be decoded. Traditionally, reef morphology has been attributed to external controls such as substrate top...

A significant proportion of mammalian genes are not represented in the genomes of Drosophila, Caenorhabditis or Saccharomyces, and many of these are assumed to have been vertebrate innovations. To test this assumption, we conducted a preliminary EST project on the anthozoan cnidarian, Acropora millepora, a basal metazoan. More than 10% of the Acropora ESTs with strong metazoan matches to the da...

Coral diseases represent a significant and increasing threat to coral reefs. Among the most destructive diseases is White Syndrome (WS), which is increasing in distribution and prevalence throughout the Indo-Pacific. The aim of this study was to determine taxonomic and spatial patterns in mortality rates of corals following the 2008 outbreak of WS at Christmas Island in the eastern Indian Ocean...

The dynamics of the coral disease, Acropora white syndrome (AWS), was directly compared on reefs in the species-poor region of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) and the species-rich region of American Samoa (AS) with results suggesting that biodiversity, which can affect the abundance of susceptible hosts, is important in influencing the impacts of coral disease outbreaks. The diversity-...

In the Persian Gulf, Acropora- dominated coral reefs have been damaged by global and local disturbances. Inversion of coral colonies mostly occur due to anchoring and fishing in many coral reefs, particularly those established nearby human societies, like the coral reef of Hengam Island, in the Persian Gulf. The short term growth rates (weight increment) of inversely and normally transplanted c...

In Acropora, the complex canals in a coral colony connect all polyps to holistic network, enabling them collaborate performing biological processes. There are various types of canals, including calice, axial and other internal with structures that dynamically altered during different growth states due calcium transport. this study, we investigated morphological changes corallite six Acropora mu...

Hundreds of coral species coexist sympatrically on reefs, reproducing in mass-spawning events where hybridization appears common. In the Caribbean, DNA sequence data from all three sympatric Acropora corals show that mass spawning does not erode species barriers. Species A. cervicornis and A. palmata are distinct at two nuclear loci or share ancestral alleles. Morphotypes historically given the...