[Coral-List] fire coral is a survivor in the Caribbean

[Katie Cramer]

Hello Coral List,

Doug, thank you for sharing Pete Edmund's very interesting article about
the resilience of fire coral (Millepora spp.) in the US Virgin Islands over
the past decades.

Our recently-conducted study (The transformation of Caribbean coral
communities since humans",
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.7808) shows that this
is a Caribbean-wide trend. We tracked changes in the prevalence of coral
taxa and life history groups across the Caribbean from the pre-human period
to 2011, and found that Millepora prevalence began increasing region-wide
in the 1980s. Millepora has many life history traits in common with
Acropora, but is more tolerant of sedimentation and has not (yet) been hit
by disease. It seems that these fire corals are now the dominant
competitive corals on many shallow reef zones in the Caribbean following
the loss of Acropora.
 -------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2022 08:19:08 -0700
From: Douglas Fenner <douglasfennertassi at gmail.com>
To: coral list <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Subject: [Coral-List] fire coral is a survivor in the Caribbean
Message-ID:
        <CAOEmEkHC30OJ9eSO7c_O8974ECJq1FNs9fxBBDZ7a67jb4gq6A at mail.gmail.com>
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How does Caribbean fire coral thrive as others vanish?

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-does-caribbean-fire-coral
-thrive-others-vanish

open-access

Persistence of a sessile benthic organism promoted by a morphological
strategy combining sheets and trees

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.0952

open-access

Cheers, Doug
-- 

*___________________________________________*

Katie Cramer

*Associate Research Professor *

Arizona State University | Center for Biodiversity Outcomes


*Ocean Science Fellow*

Conservation International | Center for Oceans & Moore Center for Science

https://katielcramer.com/