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Implications of high rates of sexual recruitment in driving rapid reef recovery in Mo'orea, French Polynesia.

ABSTRACT: Coral abundance continues to decline on tropical reefs around the world, and this trend suggests that coral reefs may not persist beyond the current century. In contrast, this study describes the near-complete mortality of corals on the outer reef (10?m and 17?m depth) of the north shore of Mo'orea, French Polynesia, from 2005 to 2010, followed by unprecedented recovery from 2011 to 2017. Intense corallivory and a cyclone drove coral cover from 33-48% to <3% by 2010, but over the following seven years, recovery occurred through rapid population growth (up to 12% cover y^-1) to 25-74% cover by 2017. The thirteen-year, U-shape trajectory of coral cover over time created by the loss and replacement of millions of corals through sexual reproduction underscores the potential for beneficial genetic responses to environmental conditions for at least one genus, Pocillopora. The high ecological resilience of this coral community appears to have been enhanced by variation among genera in the susceptibility to declining cover, and the capacity for population growth (i.e., response diversity). These results suggest that the outer coral communities of Mo'orea may be poised for genetic changes that could affect their capacity to persistence.

SUBMITTER: Edmunds PJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6226471 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Implications of high rates of sexual recruitment in driving rapid reef recovery in Mo'orea, French Polynesia.

Edmunds Peter J PJ

Scientific reports 20181109 1

Coral abundance continues to decline on tropical reefs around the world, and this trend suggests that coral reefs may not persist beyond the current century. In contrast, this study describes the near-complete mortality of corals on the outer reef (10 m and 17 m depth) of the north shore of Mo'orea, French Polynesia, from 2005 to 2010, followed by unprecedented recovery from 2011 to 2017. Intense corallivory and a cyclone drove coral cover from 33-48% to <3% by 2010, but over the following seven ...[more]

PMID: 30413729

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Project description:The advancement of metabarcoding techniques, declining costs of high-throughput sequencing and development of systematic sampling devices, such as autonomous reef monitoring structures (ARMS), have provided the means to gather a vast amount of diversity data from cryptic marine communities. However, such increased capability could also lead to analytical challenges if the methods used to examine these communities across local and global scales are not standardized. Here we compare and assess the underlying biases of four ARMS field processing methods, preservation media, and current bioinformatic pipelines in evaluating diversity from cytochrome c oxidase I metabarcoding data. Illustrating the ability of ARMS-based metabarcoding to capture a wide spectrum of biodiversity, 3,372 OTUs and twenty-eight phyla, including 17 of 33 marine metazoan phyla, were detected from 3 ARMS (2.607 m2 area) collected on coral reefs in Mo'orea, French Polynesia. Significant differences were found between processing and preservation methods, demonstrating the need to standardize methods for biodiversity comparisons. We recommend the use of a standardized protocol (NOAA method) combined with DMSO preservation of tissues for sessile macroorganisms because it gave a more accurate representation of the underlying communities, is cost effective and removes chemical restrictions associated with sample transportation. We found that sequences identified at ? 97% similarity increased more than 7-fold (5.1% to 38.6%) using a geographically local barcode inventory, highlighting the importance of local species inventories. Phylogenetic approaches that assign higher taxonomic ranks accrued phylum identification errors (9.7%) due to sparse taxonomic coverage of the understudied cryptic coral reef community in public databases. However, a ? 85% sequence identity cut-off provided more accurate results (0.7% errors) and enabled phylum level identifications of 86.3% of the sequence reads. With over 1600 ARMS deployed, standardizing methods and improving databases are imperative to provide unprecedented global baseline assessments of understudied cryptic marine species in a rapidly changing world.

Dataset Information

Implications of high rates of sexual recruitment in driving rapid reef recovery in Mo'orea, French Polynesia.

Publications

Implications of high rates of sexual recruitment in driving rapid reef recovery in Mo'orea, French Polynesia.

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