Dataset Information

Repeated and Prolonged Temperature Anomalies Negate Symbiodiniaceae Genera Shuffling in the Coral Platygyra verweyi (Scleractinia; Merulinidae).

ABSTRACT: Kuo-Wei Kao, Shashank Keshavmurthy, Cing-Hsin Tsao, Jih-Terng Wang, and Chaolun Allen Chen (2018) With climate change, global average sea surface temperatures are expected to increase by 1.0-3.7°C by the end of this century. Even a 1.0°C increase in seawater temperature from local long-term summer maxima lasting for weeks to months results in bleaching and/or mortality in reef-building corals. Studies on coral resistance mechanisms have proposed a correlation between shuffling of different Symbiodiniaceae genera (changing the dominant Symbiodiniaceae genera) and putative thermal tolerance in corals. Although it was suggested that some corals can increase their tolerance by 1.0-1.5°C through shuffling to thermally tolerant Durusdinium trenchii (formerly D1a), the effects of accumulated thermal stress due to prolonged high temperatures on the survival of corals that have shuffled have not been investigated. We show herein that prolonged exposure to high temperature (> 10.43-degree heating weeks) can drastically reduce coral survival rate even after it has shuffled to stress-tolerant Symbiodiniaceae genera. Our study suggests that there is a limit to the capacity of for shuffling, and hence is likely to lose its efficacy in the future as repeated and prolonged thermal stress events become more frequent and pronounced.

SUBMITTER: Kao KW

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6517774 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Repeated and Prolonged Temperature Anomalies Negate Symbiodiniaceae Genera Shuffling in the Coral <i>Platygyra verweyi</i> (Scleractinia; Merulinidae).

Kao Kuo-Wei KW Keshavmurthy Shashank S Tsao Cing-Hsin CH Wang Jih-Terng JT Chen Chaolun Allen CA

Zoological studies 20181120

<b>Kuo-Wei Kao, Shashank Keshavmurthy, Cing-Hsin Tsao, Jih-Terng Wang, and Chaolun Allen Chen (2018)</b> With climate change, global average sea surface temperatures are expected to increase by 1.0-3.7°C by the end of this century. Even a 1.0°C increase in seawater temperature from local long-term summer maxima lasting for weeks to months results in bleaching and/or mortality in reef-building corals. Studies on coral resistance mechanisms have proposed a correlation between shuffling of differen ...[more]

PMID: 31966295

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Project description:The Symbiodinaceae are paradoxical in that they play a fundamental role in the success of scleractinian corals, but also in their dismissal when under stress. In the past decades, the discovery of the endosymbiont's genetic and functional diversity has led people to hope that some coral species can survive bleaching events by associating with a stress-resistant symbiont that can become dominant when seawater temperatures increase. The variety of individual responses encouraged us to scrutinize each species individually to gauge its resilience to future changes. Here, we analyse the temporal variation in the Symbiodinaceae community associated with Leptoria phrygia, a common scleractinian coral from the Indo-Pacific. Coral colonies were sampled from two distant reef sites located in southern Taiwan that differ in temperature regimes, exemplifying a 'variable site' (VS) and a 'steady site' (SS). We investigated changes in the relative abundance of the dominant symbiont and its physiology every 3-4 months from 2016-2017. At VS, 11 of the 12 colonies were dominated by the stress-resistant Durusdinium spp. (>90% dominance) and only one colony exhibited co-dominance between Durusdinium spp. and Cladocopium spp. Every colony displayed high photochemical efficiency across all sampling periods, while showing temporal differences in symbiont density and chlorophyll a concentration. At SS, seven colonies out of 13 were dominated by Cladocopium spp., five presented co-dominance between Durusdinium spp./Cladocopium spp. and only one was dominated by Durusdinium spp. Colonies showed temporal differences in photochemical efficiency and chlorophyll a concentration during the study period. Our results suggest that VS colonies responded physiologically better to high temperature variability by associating with Durusdinium spp., while in SS there is still inter-colonial variability, a feature that might be advantageous for coping with different environmental changes.

Project description:Although the importance of coral holobionts is widely accepted, the relationship between the flexibility of the microbial structure and the coral host is very complicated. Particularly, the community dynamics of holobionts and the stability of host-microbe interactions under different thermal stresses remain largely unknown. In the present study, we holistically explored the physiology and growth of Acropora hyacinthus in response to increased temperatures (from 26 to 33°C). We observed that bleaching corals with loss of algal symbionts reduced lipids and proteins to maintain their survival, leading to decreased tissue biomass and retarded growth. The diversity of Symbiodiniaceae and symbiont shuffling in the community structure was mainly caused by alterations in the relative abundance of the thermally sensitive but dominant clade C symbionts and low abundance of "background types." Bacterial diversity showed a decreasing trend with increasing temperature, whereas no significant shifts were observed in the bacterial community structure. This finding might be attributed to the local adjustment of specific microbial community members that did not affect the overall metabolic state of the coral holobiont, and there was no increase in the proportion of sequences identified as typically pathogenic or opportunistic taxa. The Sloan neutral community model showed that neutral processes could explain 42.37-58.43% of bacterial community variation. The Stegen null model analysis indicates that the stochastic processes explain a significantly higher proportion of community assembly than deterministic processes when the temperature was elevated. The weak effect of temperature on the bacterial community structure and assembly might be related to an increase in stochastic dominance. The interaction of bacterial communities exhibits a fluctuating and simplistic trend with increasing temperature. Moreover, temperature increases were sufficient to establish the high stability of bacterial networks, and a non-linear response was found between the complexity and stability of the networks. Our findings collectively provide new insights into successive changes in the scleractinian coral host and holobionts in response to elevated seawater temperatures, especially the contribution of the community assembly process and species coexistence patterns to the maintenance of the coral-associated bacterial community.

Dataset Information

Repeated and Prolonged Temperature Anomalies Negate Symbiodiniaceae Genera Shuffling in the Coral Platygyra verweyi (Scleractinia; Merulinidae).

Publications

Repeated and Prolonged Temperature Anomalies Negate Symbiodiniaceae Genera Shuffling in the Coral <i>Platygyra verweyi</i> (Scleractinia; Merulinidae).

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