Coral reefs are amongst the most diverse ecosystems on Earth where complex inter-specific interactions are ubiquitous. An example of such interactions is the mutualistic relationship between damselfishes and branching corals in the Northern Red Sea, where the fish use corals as shelter and provide them with nutrients, enhance the flow between their branches, and protect them from predators. By ...

The microbial contribution to ecological resilience is still largely overlooked in coral reef ecology. Coral-associated bacteria serve a wide variety of functional roles with reference to the coral host, and thus, the composition of the overall microbiome community can strongly influence coral health and survival. Here, we synthesize the findings of recent studies (n = 45) that evaluated the im...

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...

Efficient survey methodologies that provide comprehensive assessment of reef condition are fundamental to coral reef monitoring. Current state-of-the-art techniques in coral reef assessment rely on highly trained scientific divers to measure indices of reef health (e.g., substrate cover, species richness, coral size, coral mortality). First-generation video mosaics were an innovative survey tec...

Coral reefs are, per unit area, the most productive and diverse ecosystems on the planet. Their complexity and, in some places, fragility provide many complications to scientists conducting high quality research in these environments. Scientific diving has been, for the past six decades, a highly cost-effective and productive tool in coral reef research. Using high impact outputs and based main...

The world's coral reefs are being degraded, and the need to reduce local pressures to offset the effects of increasing global pressures is now widely recognized. This study investigates the spatial and temporal dynamics of coral cover, identifies the main drivers of coral mortality, and quantifies the rates of potential recovery of the Great Barrier Reef. Based on the world's most extensive tim...

Mesophotic coral ecosystems in the Indo-Pacific remain relatively unexplored, particularly at lower mesophotic depths (≥60 m), despite their potentially large spatial extent. Here, we used a remotely operated vehicle to conduct a qualitative assessment of the zooxanthellate coral community at lower mesophotic depths (60-125 m) at 10 different locations in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and ...

Monitoring changes in coral cover and composition through space and time can provide insights to reef health and assist the focus of management and conservation efforts. We used a meta-analytical approach to assess coral cover data across latitudes 10-35°S along the west Australian coast, including 25 years of data from the Ningaloo region. Current estimates of coral cover ranged between 3 and ...

CORAL is a language for specifying properties of ACOEL, a component-oriented extensional language. The design of CORAL is based on input/output automata and type state. The properties of ACOEL components that need to be verified are specified using CORAL. A verification engine will then crawl through CORAL and verify whether ACOEL can be safely executed or not. In this paper we focus on CORAL, ...

Coral reefs are biodiversity hotpots that are under significant threat due to the degradation and death of hard corals. When obligate coral-dwelling species die, the remaining species must either move or adjust to the altered conditions. Our goal was to investigate the effect of coral degradation on the ability of coral reef fishes to assess their risk of predation using alarm cues from injured...