In the past decade, significant efforts have been made to describe fish-habitat associations. However, most studies have oversimplified actual connections between fish assemblages and their habitats by using univariate correlations. The purpose of this study was to identify the features of habitat forming corals that facilitate and influences assemblages of associated species such as fishes. Fo...

Dense Acropora cervicornis aggregations, or patches, have been documented within nearshore habitats in Southeast Florida (SE FL) despite close proximity to numerous anthropogenic stressors and subjection to frequent natural disturbance events. Limited information has been published concerning the distribution and abundance of A. cervicornis outside of these known dense patches. The first goal o...

In a coral-algae symbiotic system, heat-dependent photoinhibition of photosystem II (PSII) leads to coral bleaching. When the reef-building coral Acropora digitifera was exposed to light, a moderate increase of temperature induced coral bleaching through photobleaching of algal pigments, but not through expulsion of symbiotic algae. Monitoring of PSII photoinhibition revealed that heat-dependen...

Symbionts in each generation are transmitted to new host individuals either vertically (parent to offspring), horizontally (from exogenous sources), or a combination of both. Scleractinian corals make an excellent study system for understanding patterns of symbiont transmission since they harbor diverse symbionts and possess distinct reproductive modes of either internal brooding or external br...

Coral spawning in the northern Gulf of Aqaba has been reported to be asynchronous, making it almost unique when compared to other regions in the world. Here, we document the reproductive condition of corals in Acropora early June 2014 in Dahab, in the Gulf of Aqaba, 125 km south of previous studies conducted in Eilat, Israel. Seventy-eight percent of colonies Acropora from 14 species had mature...

Over the past three decades, populations of the dominant shallow water Caribbean corals, Acropora cervicornis and A. palmata, have been devastated by white-band disease (WBD), resulting in the listing of both species as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. A key to conserving these threatened corals is understanding how their populations are genetically interconnected throughout th...

Vibrio coralliilyticus is a marine gammaproteobacterium that has been implicated as an etiological agent of disease for multiple coral genera on reefs worldwide. We report the complete genome of V. coralliilyticus strain OCN014, isolated from a diseased Acropora cytherea colony off the western reef terrace of Palmyra Atoll.

We investigated the effect of five levels pCO2-adjusted seawater (300 μatm [pre-industrial] to 1200 [near-future]) on calcification rates six coral species: Acropora nasuta, A. tenuis, Montipora digitata, Pocillopora damicornis, Porites cylindrica, and Galaxea fascicularis, which are common species in subtropical Ryukyu Archipelago, Japan. In most species, declines were pCO2-dependent as previo...

While density dependence is a popular topic of research in population ecology, it has received much less attention at the community level. Using 27 years of data from Heron Island, on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, we develop a matrix model of coral community dynamics that shows that community-level density dependence does occur and that it is fairly common, being found in 38% of the model par...

Coral reef conservation requires information about the distance over which healthy reefs can rescue damaged reefs through input of coral larvae. This information is desperately needed in the Caribbean where the 2 dominant shallow water corals Acropora cervicornis and Acropora palmata have suffered unprecedented declines. Here we compare the population genetic structure in the staghorn coral A. ...