[Coral-List] Coral health and disease session in Hawaii

[Laurie Richardson]

Greetings!  We would like to announce a coral health and disease session
we have organized for the 13th Ocean Sciences Meeting, a joint meeting
of ASLO, TOS and AGU.  The meeting will be held 20-24 February 2006 in
Honolulu, Hawaii
(http://www.agu.org/meetings/os06/).  The abstract deadline is Oct 2005.

For this meeting the coral disease and coral symbiosis communities are
joining together to share their perspectives in a special session that
addresses coral health
from the perspective of the holobiont.  Please consider submitting an
abstract to this session, and share this email with our colleagues,
thanks!

Session information:

Session OS78:
The Coral Holobiont, Coral Health and Disease, and Environmental Change
    The coral holobiont is defined as the totality of a coral animal,
its endosymbiotic zooxanthellae, and the associated community of
microorganisms. Stresses and perturbations that affect any member (or
any combination of members) of the coral holobiont are proposed to lead
to coral degradation, disease, and mortality. This session will explore
the different ways the coral holobiont is affected by stresses such as
increased sea surface temperature, increased UV light, and
nutrient loading. Emphasis will be placed on mechanism-level responses,
interactions among members of the holobiont, and overall coral reef
degradation.   In our session, we will also take a global perspective to
the distributions and causes of coral disease outbreaks, considering
both new introductions of pathogens and newly compromised host immunity.
We will encourage exploration of hypotheses about causes of outbreaks
(e.g. environmental drivers) and also work that pinpoints identities and
origins of disease-causing microorganisms.

Conveners:
Laurie Richardson, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199
USA, Tel:
     305 348-1988, Fax: 305 348-1986; email: Laurie.Richardson at fiu.edu
Gisèle Muller-Parker, National Science Foundation/WWU, 4201 Wilson Blvd,

     Arlington, VA 22230 USA, Tel: 703-292-8475, Fax: 703-292-9085,
     email: gmullerp at nsf.gov
Drew Harvell, Dept Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University,
321
     Corson Hall , Ithaca, NY 14850 USA, Tel: 607-254-4274, Fax:
07-255-8088,
     email: cdh5 at cornell.edu
Jo-Ann Leong, Hawaii Inst Marine Biology, Coconut Island, Honolulu, HI
USA,
    email: joannleo at hawaii.edu

We look forward to a stimulating and interactive session.

Laurie, Gisèle, Drew, and Jo-Ann