coral reef research paper topics

91 Coral Reef Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best coral reef topic ideas & essay examples, 🥇 most interesting coral reef topics to write about.

• 🎓 Simple & Easy Coral Reef Essay Title

❓ Research Questions About Coral Reefs

• Importance of Coral Reefs The algae that is found in the sea also helps in reef building because they contain limestone and this is important in the integrity of the reefs.
• Great Barrier Reef: Flood Alleviation Solutions In the first presentation, solutions to protect the Great Barrier Reef, which is endangered from rising acidity levels due to methane extraction, were given while the second, third and fourth presentations focused on the measures […] We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Coral Reef and Biodiversity in Ecosystems Coral reefs are formed only in the tropical zone of the ocean; the temperature limits their life – are from +18 to +29oS, and at the slightest deviation from the boundaries of the coral die.
• Biomes and Ecosystems: Aquatic & Coral Reefs In some of them, the protection is enhanced by the presence of anemones on the shell. Currently, under the influence of anthropogenic factors, there is a reduction in biological diversity due to the elimination of […]
• The Tridacnids Species in a Coral Reef Ecosystem Tridacnids are the inhabitants of coral reefs’ shallow waters in the Indo-Pacific region and the largest mollusks not only among the modern but even among the fossil ones.
• Divers Practices and Associated Effects on Coral Reefs However, in a bid to preserve the good marine life and the coral with excellent visibility in the Sharm el-Sheikh, it is necessary to control the crowding of divers because may damage the coral reefs. […]
• Coral Reefs Protection: Academic Sources Analysis The authors published the work on behalf of the United States Department of Commerce and provided only objective information in the form of statistical calculations; therefore, the level of bias is low.
• IMC Campaign Project of Hawaii Living Reef The Hawaii Living Reef Program will focus on the target audiences to aware them about the importance of the coral reef ecosystem, to change their behavior towards living reefs, to aware about the consequence of […]
• Hawaii Living Reef Program: Strategic Plan The Hawaii living reef program aims at sensitizing the communities living in the island of the importance of conserving the coral reefs.
• Hydrosphere: Coral Reefs and Their Protection The theme of this paper is to discuss the coral reefs ecosystem and the favorable environment required for the growth and maintenance of the corals.
• Biology. Coral Reef Disease as an Emerging Issue The disease affects the tissue of pink starlet coral and the blush star coral and to a lesser extent in Montastraea annularis.
• Biology: Coral Reef and Its Diseases The stresses that affect coral reefs can include changes in water temperature, differences in the amount of ultraviolet radiation they are exposed to and the amount of sedimentation and pollutants that settle in and around […]
• Protected Marine Areas: Great Barrier Reef To protect the Great Barrier Reef the administration has put in place several policies to protect this region. In this plan, A panel of scientists was to advise on the quality of waste.
• Ecology of Coral Reefs Review However, there are also places in the ocean such as the seafloor slopes up toward the continental shelf and the oceanic islands where the marine life is concentrated due to the availability of sunlight and […]
• Review of the Quaternary History of Reefs in the Red Sea With Reference to Past Sea-Level Changes Some of the changes have occurred on the very grandest of scales, such as the Merging and ensuing breaking up of huge supercontinents, or the decimation of the dinosaurs by extra-terrestrial impacts.reefs are not invulnerable […]
• Coral Bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef The economic implications of the inclusion of the large figures in this report may lead the reader to inquire why the losses are so significant in the case of coral reefs.
• Coral Reefs Destruction, Its Causes and Effects Investigation of the causes and effects of the destruction of CRs is a significant and interesting topic. The effects of CR destruction are connected with the people and the environment.
• Coral Reefs in Australia Following the ecological importance of the coral reefs, under the management of Australia and Queensland government, zoning of the coral area was done along the coastline, thus creating the Great Barrier Reef.
• The Great Barrier Reef The System Analysis Diagram of the Current Situation The first diagram indicates that the effects of human activities on the GBR may not be necessarily direct, and sometimes they are very difficult to trace.
• Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Reefs This essay addresses some of the disturbances which have been experienced in the coral reefs of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary together with measures which have been implemented to salvage the ecosystem.
• Global Warming and Coral Reefs The frightening evidence of the devastating tendencies in coral reef reduction can be illustrated by the case of the coral cover of the Rio Bueno, a coral reef site on the North East of Jamaica […]
• Coral Bleaching and Its Impact on Coral Reefs Ecosystems
• Improving Water Quality and Protect Coral Health in the Great Barrier Reef
• Coral Reef Ecosystems Under Climate Change and Ocean Acidification
• Coral Reef Bleaching and the Impact on the Marine Ecosystem
• Benefits and Related Threats of Coral Reef Ecosystem Services
• Coral Reef Monitoring, Reef Assessment Technologies, and Ecosystem-Based Management
• Benthic Oxygen and Nitrogen Exchange on a Cold-Water Coral Reef
• Coral Reef Building Organisms and Form the Reef Framework
• Beyond Reef Restoration: Next-Generation Techniques for Coral Gardening, Landscaping, and Outreach
• Coral Reef Pollution Can Hurt Bermuda’s Tourism Industry
• Building Coral Reef Resilience Through Spatial Herbivore Management
• Coral Reef Carbonate Chemistry Variability at Different Functional Scales
• Selectivity of Fishing Gears in a Multi-Species Indonesian Coral Reef Fishery
• Coast Guards Should Prevent Divers From Going Near a Living Coral Reef
• Co-management Strategy for the Sustainable Use of Coral Reef Resources
• Coral Reef Degradation Differentially Alters Feeding Ecology of Co-occurring Congeneric Spiny Lobsters
• Reconstructing Four Centuries of Temperature-Induced Coral Bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef
• Tropical Fish Diversity Enhances Coral Reef Functioning Across Multiple Scales
• Conserving Coral Reef Organisms That Lack Larval Dispersal
• Coral Biodiversity and Bio-Construction in the Mesoamerican Reef System

🎓 Simple & Easy Coral Reef Essay Titles

• Quantifying Coral Reef Resilience to Climate Change and Human Development
• Thermally Variable, Macrotidal Reef Habitats Promote Recovery From Mass Coral Bleaching
• Role of Larval Connectivity Among Coral Reef Islands in an Era of Global Change
• The Link Between Ecological Goods and Services of Coral Reef Ecosystems
• Analysis of Optics and Ecophysiology of Coral Reef Organisms
• Emerging Technologies and Coral Reef Conservation: Opportunities, Challenges, and Moving Forward
• Few Herbivore Species Consume Dominant Macroalgae on a Caribbean Coral Reef
• Fine-Scale Coral Connectivity Pathways in the Florida Reef Tract
• Great Barrier Reef: Impacts of Sea Temperature on Coral Bleaching
• Managing Local Stressors for Coral Reef Condition
• Multiple Stressors and Ecological Complexity Require a New Approach to Coral Reef
• The Importance of Partner Abundance in Reef Coral Symbioses
• The Effects of Climate Change on Coral Reef Ecosystems
• Science, Diplomacy, and the Red Seas Unique Coral Reef: Its Time for Action
• Small Scale Genetic Population Structure of Coral Reef Organisms
• The Analysis of the Great Barrier Reef of Australia’s Coral Reefs
• Time Preferences and the Management of Coral Reef Fisheries
• Warmer Water Affects Immunity of a Tolerant Reef Coral
• What Can Artificial Intelligence Offer Coral Reef Managers?
• What Is Happening to Coral Reefs as a Result of Ocean Acidification?
• How Does Human Overpopulation Affect Coral Reefs?
• Why Are Coral Reefs Dying?
• Are Coral Reefs Beneficial to the Ecosystem and Mankind?
• How Can People Prevent Coral Reefs From Disappearing?
• Why Is Coral Reef the Most Productive Ecosystem?
• How Does Climate Change Affect Coral Reefs?
• What Is the Impact of Humans on the Resilience of Coral Reefs?
• How Is Plastic Waste Linked to Diseases on Coral Reefs?
• What Is the Variety of Coral Reefs?
• How Far and How Often Do Fish on Coral Reefs Disperse?
• What Are the Effects of Coral Reefs on Populations in the Atlantic and Caribbean Region?
• How Are Coral Reefs Related to Shark Extinction?
• What Will Happen if the Coral Reefs Are Destroyed?
• What Threatens the Decomposition of Coral Reefs?
• Is It Correct to Believe That Coral Reefs Are the Source of Life in Our World?
• What Is the Impact of Coral Reefs on the Environment?
• What Problems Do Cruise Liners Cause for Coral Reefs?
• How Are Coral Reefs Formed?
• How Are Coral Reefs Related to Other Underwater Life Forms?
• Coral Reefs: Are They the Rainforests of the Sea?
• How Does Coral Bleaching Affect Coral Reefs?
• What Is the Current and Future Status of Coral Reefs in Malaysia?
• How Does the Sugar Industry Affect Florida’s Coral Reefs?
• Is There a Connection Between Global Warming and Coral Reefs?
• How Are Coral Reefs Classified?
• Can Restocking Herbivorous Fish Populations Be a Tool for Coral Reef Restoration?
• How Can We Save Them Coral Reefs?
• What Factors Play an Important Role in Fish Production in Coral Reefs?
• How Are Coral Reefs Managed in the South China Sea?
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Systematic review and meta-analysis of 50 years of coral disease research visualized through the scope of network theory

Luis m. montilla.

Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela

Alfredo Ascanio

Alejandra verde, aldo croquer, associated data.

The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

The data and the analysis used is available at GitHub:

https://github.com/luismmontilla/CoDiRNet .

Coral disease research encompasses five decades of undeniable progress. Since the first descriptions of anomalous signs, we have come to understand multiple processes and environmental drivers that interact with coral pathologies. In order to gain a better insight into the knowledge we already have, we explored how key topics in coral disease research have been related to each other using network analysis. We reviewed 719 papers and conference proceedings published from 1965 to 2017. From each study, four elements determined our network nodes: (1) studied disease(s); (2) host genus; (3) marine ecoregion(s) associated with the study site; and (4) research objectives. Basic properties of this network confirmed that there is a set of specific topics comprising the majority of research. The top five diseases, genera, and ecoregions studied accounted for over 48% of the research effort in all cases. The community structure analysis identified 15 clusters of topics with different degrees of overlap among them. These clusters represent the typical sets of elements that appear together for a given study. Our results show that while some coral diseases have been studied considering multiple aspects, the overall trend is for most diseases to be understood under a limited range of approaches, e.g., bacterial assemblages have been considerably studied in Yellow and Black band diseases while immune response has been better examined for the aspergillosis- Gorgonia system. Thus, our challenge in the near future is to identify and resolve potential gaps in order to achieve a more comprehensive progress on coral disease research.

Introduction

Coral diseases have been an important factor responsible for the decline of coral reefs in the last decades ( Rogers & Miller, 2013 ). Although pathogens and diseases are part of the natural dynamics of ecosystems, including coral reefs, the interaction with other stressful environmental factors aggravates their negative effects ( Ban, Graham & Connolly, 2014 ), enhancing important losses of live coral cover ( Lewis et al., 2017 ; Precht et al., 2016 ; Randall & Van Woesik, 2015 ). This loss of coral cover has been particularly important in the Caribbean, which has been frequently called a ”coral disease hot spot” because of the number of diseases and the range of affected species in comparison with the low coral cover in the region ( Bruckner, 2002 ; Green & Bruckner, 2000 ).

The evolution of this body of knowledge has been compiled and updated frequently in multiple narrative reviews ( Goreau et al., 1998 ; Bourne et al., 2009 ; Antonius, 1981 ; Green & Bruckner, 2000 ; Richardson, 1998 ; Rosenberg & Ben-haim, 2002 ; Santavy & Peters, 1997 ; Weil, Smith & Gil-Agudelo, 2006 ; Woodley et al., 2015 ). However, quantitative approaches (e.g., meta-analyses, systematic reviews) that complement these publications have been less frequent. One example is the result provided by  Work & Meteyer (2014) , who examined almost 500 coral disease papers, and classified the used methods in terms of six broad categories. From their analysis they evidenced the scarcity of microscopical sign descriptions using histological techniques. In another example,  Ward & Lafferty (2004) analyzed the frequency of coral disease papers as a potential proxy of a coral diseases incidence. Finally,  Ban, Graham & Connolly (2014) reviewed the experimental research about at least two stressors simultaneously using network theory. These types of syntheses, although scarce, provide important benefits over narrative reviews such as offering a wide and more objective perspective of the research landscape, integrating the trends in subfields of a discipline, and potentially identifying research gaps and opportunities for new questions to be explored ( Lortie, 2014 ).

Here we present a systematic review aimed at identifying groups of coral disease research topics that have been explored more frequently than others. To do this, we performed a network analysis approach. Network analysis is frequently used in systematic reviews ( Borrett, Moody & Edelmann, 2014 ; Ohniwa, Hibino & Takeyasu, 2010 ) and allows researchers to address multiple issues in coral disease research, such as the evaluation of phage-bacteria interactions ( Soffer, Zaneveld & Vega-Thurber, 2014 ) synergistic effects of environmental stressors ( Ban, Graham & Connolly, 2014 ), the analysis of microbial positive and negative interactions in healthy and diseased conditions ( Sweet & Bulling, 2017 ; Meyer et al., 2016 ), and the analysis of gene expression and regulation ( Wright et al., 2015 ). We hypothesized that if the research topics typically addressed in coral research lack uniformity among several key aspects of epizootiology, then a network representing the co-apparition of these topics in coral disease research papers would exhibit a community structure, where the communities (also called clusters) of nodes would represent the different themes that have characterized most of coral disease research in the last 50 years.

Data acquisition

We reviewed a total of 719 publications spanning a period from 1969 to 2017. We searched for these in the search engines and databases Google scholar , Meta , and Peerus , using combinations of keywords with search modifiers, including “coral disease”, “syndrome”, “yellow”, “black”, “purple”, “spot”, “band”, “pox”, “dark”, “plague”, “growth”, “trematode”, “anomalies”, “ciliate”, “soft coral”, and “aspergillosis”. This included peer-reviewed papers and conference proceedings, since the latter would also provide information about research questions explored in a given time and a given location. We excluded thesis, preprints , and book chapters. Additionally, we compared our database with the list of papers analyzed by  Work & Meteyer (2014) looking for potential omissions. The papers were included if the research question directly addressed some biological or ecological aspect of coral diseases or coral pathogens ( Fig. 1 ). The comprehensive list of included papers is provided as Supplemental Information . For every paper, we assessed four fundamental questions, each one corresponding to one node category:

• • What was the studied disease? Each disease was listed as an individual node and the cases where there was no specific disease of interest (e.g., general surveys), we assigned the node “multiple diseases”. Additionally, we classified “White Syndrome” as all the descriptions of pathologies involving tissue discoloration and loss from the Pacific sensu ( Bourne et al., 2015 ). We applied similar criteria and classified “Pink syndrome” as the references to Pink spots, Pink line syndrome, Pink-Blue syndrome, and Pink-Blue spot syndrome, as these diseases have not been clearly distinguished from one another. We excluded papers specifically concerning thermally-induced bleaching but included the node “bleaching effects” for papers investigating the effects of bleaching over some disease topic or vice versa.
• • Where did the samples come from? Or where was the study conducted? We reported the corresponding marine ecoregion sensu ( Spalding et al., 2007 ). When no explicit sampling site was stated, we contacted the respective authors to verify the location.
• • What was the genus of the affected host? If the study implicated multiple specific genera, each one was listed as an individual node. In the cases of baselines and similar studies which lacked specific taxa of interest, we assigned the node “multiple genera”.
• • What were the objectives of the study? We specifically looked into the questions or specific objectives addressed in the introduction section of the papers and assigned a set of keywords. Each keyword represented one node in the network. The complete list of keywords (Supp. 2) is included as a supplementary file at https://github.com/luismmontilla/CoDiRNet/tree/master/supplementary .

Two of the authors (see author contributions) performed the assignation of nodes to each study, and in the case of disagreements, all the authors were consulted until a consensus was reached.

Network construction and community structure analysis

Using the extracted topics as vertices and their co-occurrence in a given paper as the edges, we built an undirected weighted network. The weight w ij was the frequency of co-occurrence of the keywords i and j in the same article ( Fig. 2 ). The network was constructed and analyzed using the R package igraph ( Csardi & Nepusz, 2006 ; RCoreteam, 2016 ). Considering the size and complexity of the resulting graph, we used the network reduction algorithm proposed by Serrano, Boguna & Vespignani (2009) , implemented in the package disparityfilter for R ( Bessi, 2015 ) to extract the backbone of our network. This resulted in a smaller graph that retains the multiscale properties of the original network.

(A) represents a hypothetical paper focusing on the effect of temperature on of Yellow band disease in a country of the Southern Caribbean. Each paper produces a fully connected graph. In (B) a second hypothetical paper generates its own graph, which has a link between Orbicella and Temperature in common with (A). (C) represents the resulting network, with the link between Orbicella and Temperature representing the co-apparition in two papers and the remaining links representing one paper.

Next, we used the link communities approach ( Ahn, Bagrow & Lehmann, 2010 ) to obtain groups of nodes forming closely connected groups (hereafter, referred as communities), using the linkcomm package ( Kalinka & Tomancak, 2011 ). With this method overlapping communities may appear, which allows for several nodes to be part of multiple communities (the scripts for the used functions with their modifications are available at https://github.com/luismmontilla/CoDiRNet . We explored the similarity among the obtained communities, representing them as a new network of communities where each community was a node, and the edges had the value of the Jaccard coefficient for the number of shared nodes (hence, communities without shared topics would be disconnected). Additionally, we used the community centrality ( Kalinka & Tomancak, 2011 ) as a measure of the importance of each node within their respective communities.

To test the statistical robustness of the obtained communities, we measured the communities assortativity ( r com ) using a modification of the method proposed by ( Shizuka & Farine, 2016 ). In this case, this metric measures a proportion of derived replicates (permuting the network edges) that result in the same community structure as the network derived from the original data. The coefficient is a value ranging from −1 to 1, where values closer to 0 indicate that the community structure in the network of interest differed from the communities obtained in random permutations; values close to 1 indicate that the permuted networks have similar node communities as the original network; and values close to −1 indicate that the communities of the permutation-derived replicates are formed by different nodes in contrast with the original network. We used a modification (hereafter r oc ) that allows the use of this coefficient for overlapping communities (code available at https://github.com/alspeed09/OverlapCommAssortativity ).

The content of all the 719 coral disease papers yielded a network comprising 302 vertices and 4,184 edges. The strength distribution (i.e., the distribution of the sum of all connections to the nodes) revealed that the coral disease research network, like other natural networks, presented a highly skewed distribution, where most research topics share few connections and a comparatively small group of topics are heavily represented in scientific publications. This pattern persisted for the specific distribution of each type of nodes, suggesting that over the past 50 years, coral disease research has focused on a reduced number of questions in each category ( Fig. 3 ).

Considering this, we explored the identity of the five most represented topics in each case. For all the categories, five topics accounted for over 40% of the total frequency of apparition in all the examined papers ( Table 1 ). We show that the evaluations of prevalence and/or incidence have had a prominent place in research, together with questions about the spatial patterns, transmission, and descriptions of the signs (mostly visual but also histological descriptions) of diseases. The role of temperature stress had also received priority in comparison with other environmental drivers.

After applying the disparity filter, the initial network was reduced to 93 vertices and 233 edges. The set of excluded research questions were included as supplementary material at https://github.com/luismmontilla/CoDiRNet . These excluded topics either encompass a set of highly-specific questions being scarcely explored (e.g., diseases on mesophotic corals, the effects of ocean acidification, or the role of commensal bacteria) or new questions altogether.

From this reduced network, we obtained a total of 15 node communities (hereafter, referred as C1 to C15). We obtained a r oc value of 0.23, indicating that the network effectively possess a community structure that departs from randomness. These groups ranged from small communities with low overlap, to rich and highly interconnected communities, e.g., C5 and C14 shared almost 50% of their members ( Fig. 4 ).

Node size represents the number of topics in each community, and edge width represents the similarity between two given communities.

The smaller communities were composed of six or less nodes. C3 represented four topics related to questions about temporal patterns; C6 represented four genera typically affected by Dark Spot disease; C8 was comprised of studies dealing with stress temperature and zooxanthellae damage in the Great Barrier Reef and nearby locations. C9 showed that an important group of studies related to White Band disease have been focused in determining the advance rate, transmission patterns, and usually a description of the signs. C10 included the effects of environmental factors on diseased and bleached corals ( Fig. 5 ).

Each column represents a different community and the rows indicate the membership of a given topic to one or multiple communities. e.g., Topics in C9 belong exclusively to this community while the topic Dark Spot disease belong to two different communities. Circle size represents the importance of the topic within a community, measured as overall node centrality.

The medium-sized communities offered more clear pictures of several trends prevailing in the coral disease research. C1 was an Acropora -centered community. This included topics related to the descriptions of signs, bacterial assemblages, transmission mechanisms and pattern of several affections like White Syndromes, White Pox, and Brown Band disease, in the Great Barrier Reef. C7 included studies around Caribbean Yellow band disease, mostly about changes in the microbial community, and also temporal and spatial patterns of the disease. C11 was a community constituted by studies about Vibrio as a coral pathogen, especially infecting the genera Oculina , Montipora , and Pocillopora . C13 was a community that incorporated two research trends. The most important node in this community was White Syndrome, associated to topics like pathogen characterization, transmission experiments, and changes in bacterial assemblages of the hosts. These hosts were mainly Montipora and Porites , which were the connection to the second group: research about growth anomalies and trematode infections in Hawaii. C15 was a community centered on gorgonian affections and immune processes ( Fig. 6 ).

Each column represents a different community and the rows indicate the membership of a given topic to one or multiple communities. Circle size represents the importance of the topic within a community, measured as overall node centrality.

All the large communities (nodes >5) had two nodes in common: Black Band disease and Southern Caribbean. C2 was the most specific one, including objectives related to Black Band disease only. C4 also included Yellow Band disease and White Plague, in this case encompassing studies dealing with transmission experiments, effects of temperature and changes in the associated microbiota. C5 was a community covering reviews, meta-analysis, baseline studies, and outbreaks reports. C12 was very similar to C4, with the distinction of including studies about White Pox, pathogen characterization, particularly Serratia marscescens , pathogen metabolites, and the Bahamian ecoregion. C14 consisted of several topics shared with C5, with the particular difference of including studies on Acropora and White Syndromes ( Fig. 7 ).

The network approximation used in this study for analyzing the relationships between coral disease research topics provided a quantitative perspective on the intensity of the research and the extension of the field so far. The communities obtained summarized the dominant trends (considering the bulk of the historical research), with each community corresponding to the themes of interest that have accumulated most of the published papers up to 2017. It is important to notice that we expected some minimal community structure to arise in our network, for some diseases affect only a specific set of coral genera and in certain regions. However, our hypotheses was that the patterns of addressed questions would also contribute to the apparition of multiple communities in our network.

Our results display some clear patterns. For example, Black Band disease occupies a preponderant place in coral disease research as the most connected disease that also appears in most communities with the highest centrality. There are several reasons contributing to this. Black Band disease affection has been studied since the emergence of the field ( Antonius, 1976 ; Garrett & Ducklow, 1975 ) and it has consistently accumulated a body of knowledge that makes it the most studied coral disease so far. Its effects comprise a substantial number of coral hosts across different ecoregions and produce extensive mortality during disease epizootics ( Diraviya Raj et al., 2016 ; Aeby et al., 2015 ; Yang et al., 2014 ; Sato, Bourne & Willis, 2009 ; Hobbs et al., 2015 ), especially when combined with seasonal or anomalous temperature increases and determined light conditions ( Chen et al., 2017 ; Lewis et al., 2017 ; Bhedi et al., 2017 ; Miller & Richardson, 2015 ; Kuehl et al., 2011 ; Sato, Bourne & Willis, 2011 ; Boyett, Bourne & Willis, 2007 ). Additionally, there have been important advances in the field derived from studies about this disease. Studies about the pathobiome of Black Band disease pioneered the concept of pathogenic consortia as etiological agents of coral diseases ( Carlton & Richardson, 1995 ), and the accumulated findings are allowing the proposal of etiological models ( Sato et al., 2016 ). In contrast, other diseases have been important enough to appear in their own communities, but they have been associated with less diverse research themes. For example, Caribbean Yellow Band disease has been studied mostly around the changes in its microbial assemblages, and soft coral Aspergillosis studies usually deal with immune processes; in both cases the number of objectives is similar or lower to the number of ecoregions, implying that research have been extended to different regions but the same set of questions remain.

Our findings also highlight the historical importance of environmental stressors for a broad number of diseases. In our network, temperature was consistently associated with several communities, and the role of sedimentation, turbidity, and nutrient loads (including input through sewage waters) were the main environmental factors associated with baseline studies. This was consistent with a previous review where the authors found that the temperature was the most frequently studied environmental variable in their sample, along with sedimentation, both variables having high influence over coral diseases ( Ban, Graham & Connolly, 2014 ).

This contribution complements previous narrative reviews ( sensu Lortie, 2014 ; Petticrew, 2001 ; Morais, Medeiros & Santos, 2018 ) about coral diseases; the previously mentioned low-to-mid topic diversity communities together with the list of topics excluded from the backbone network and the list of non-existing links (Supp. 4) can be used as a reference of questions, locations, or affected genera in different coral diseases that could be tackled in future research, especially if we aim to fill existing gaps or strengthen existing but poorly explored processes related to coral diseases.

For example, research about coral immunity has been steadily progressing, however, there is so much room for exploration if we consider that the use of specific approaches can be tested on different coral diseases. For instance, topics like ‘gene expression’ and ‘protein expression’ were excluded from the backbone, probably because they represent emergent perspectives, but there are examples of the application of these methods like immune-related transcriptomic profiles that have been developed for Yellow Band disease ( Anderson et al., 2016 ), growth anomalies ( Frazier et al., 2017 ), and White Band disease ( Libro, Kaluziak & Vollmer, 2013 ), while other diseases remain to be explored from this approach. Additionally, the research about coral immunity can be extended when we take into consideration traits like susceptibilities ranges to environmental stress and diseases and the complex symbiotic interactions that constitute the coral holobiont ( Palmer, 2018 ), increasing the attention not only to the identity of the microbial assemblage members but also to their functional role in the holobiont. In this sense, in our backbone network, two topics associated to zooxanthellae (‘zooxanthellae photosyntetic performance’, and ‘zooxanthellae damage’) were mostly associated to four diseases, and the topic ‘functional structure’ was excluded from the backbone.

The knowledge about coral disease interactions with environmental stressful conditions can also be widely expanded if we increase the attention to other variables or their interactions with some better studied ones. The role of high temperatures has been the main environmental driver addressed, in coral research, however there are other conditions that have been explored in a few papers like changes in water pH ( Muller et al., 2017 ; Stanić et al., 2011 ; Remily & Richardson, 2006 ), dissolved oxygen ( Remily & Richardson, 2006 ), and other better studied like the role of nutrient enrichment ( Kaczmarsky & Richardson, 2011 ; Vega-Thurber et al., 2014 ; Voss & Richardson, 2006 ; Bruno et al., 2003 ; Looney, Sutherland & Lipp, 2010 ) whose potentially interactive effects with temperature and diseases remain far less explored.

Other relevant aspect of this field that can be improved in the future is the incorporation of open science practices, making available annotated coral disease specific datasets—represented in our network as the ‘database’ topic—e.g., Caldwell et al., 2016a ; Burns et al., 2016 , or the Global Coral Disease Database ( https://www.unep-wcmc.org/resources-and-data/global-coral-disease-database ), especially considering that we found the topic ‘baseline’ as an important node in the network but most of this data is not freely available, and it would represent an invaluable resource for further analysis.

In summary, we obtained a generalized representation of the most explored topics in coral disease research. However, these predominant themes and questions are yet to be generalized to the range of potential coral hosts and their diseases. One additional contribution of this work is the availability of a growing database that can be used for further and more diverse exploration of the trends in this field, including the detection of emerging topics and temporal trends, which will help to gain better insights of the development of coral disease research.

Supplemental Information

Supplemental information 1, supplemental information 2, acknowledgments.

We wish to thank Laurie Richardson, Longin Kaczmarsky, and Mike Sweet for the information provided. Also Stuart Sandin, Mark Vermeij, Eugenia Sanchez, Bill Gowacki, and Kourtney Barber for their comments on an early manuscript.

Funding Statement

The authors received no funding for this work.

Additional Information and Declarations

The authors declare there are no competing interests.

Luis M. Montilla conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.

Alfredo Ascanio performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.

Alejandra Verde performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft, data curation.

Aldo Croquer authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.

Reviewing the status of coral reef ecology of the Red Sea: key topics and relevant research

• Published: 23 May 2014
• Volume 33 , pages 1179–1180, ( 2014 )

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• Y. Loya 1 ,
• A. Genin 2 , 3 ,
• M. el-Zibdeh 4 ,
• M. S. Naumann 5 &
• C. Wild 5 , 6  

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Berumen ML, Hoey AS, Bass WH, Bouwmeester J, Catania D, Cochran JEM, Khalil MT, Miyake S, Mughal MR, Spaet JLY, Saenz-Agudelo P (2013) The status of coral reef ecology research in the Red Sea. Coral Reefs 32:737–748

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to B. Brown, FA Horani, T. Hughes, and R. van Woesik for their constructive comments on earlier versions of the Ms. We would especially like to thank the Editor H. Lasker and the Handling Editor H. Sweatman for their substantial editing of earlier versions of the Ms., as well as the useful comments by two anonymous reviewers. This work was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) No. 341/12 to YL and the U.S. Middle East Regional Cooperation (MERC) Program Agency for International Development (MERC/USAID) No. M32-037 to YL and FAH.

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Department of Zoology, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, 69978, Tel Aviv, Israel

The Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences, POB 469, 88103, Eilat, Israel

Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, Silverman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 91904, Jerusalem, Israel

The University of Jordan, Marine Science Station, P.O. 195, Aqaba, Jordan

M. el-Zibdeh

Coral Reef Ecology Group (CORE), Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Ecology (ZMT), Fahrenheitstr. 6, 28359, Bremen, Germany

M. S. Naumann & C. Wild

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Loya, Y., Genin, A., el-Zibdeh, M. et al. Reviewing the status of coral reef ecology of the Red Sea: key topics and relevant research. Coral Reefs 33 , 1179–1180 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-014-1170-1

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-014-1170-1

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EPA Research about Coral Reefs

• stresses from high water temperatures and acidification;
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• approaches for framing management scenarios that support informed decisions by communities and resource managers.

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Water Quality Criteria and Coral Reefs

EPA’s mission under the Clean Water Act (CWA) is to protect and restore the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waterbodies. These waterbodies include marine coastal zones within territorial waters (usually three miles or more from shore) where many of our coral reef ecosystems occur. Most often, water quality is protected under the CWA by setting limits, through water quality criteria, on the presence and amount of chemical and physical stressors. The CWA also identifies water quality criteria based on the biological condition of the organisms inhabiting the waterbody, such as coral reef organisms. Biological water quality criteria use the condition of the organisms to determine whether or not a waterbody is protective of human health, fish, wildlife, and recreation in and on the water (CWA §101).

Biological water quality standards are less often used in regulatory management but biological condition is a valuable reflection of water quality because the health of an organism is determined by the cumulative effects of multiple stressors over time. This is clearly an issue for coral reefs, which face threats from ocean warming, acidification, physical damage, and land based pollutants such as sediment, nutrients, and contaminants.

EPA has developed technical assistance documents for states, tribes, and territories to assist in developing biological criteria and biological assessment programs. 

• Technical assistance for developing biological criteria and assessment programs for corals

Developing Biological Criteria and Assessment Programs for Coral Reefs

• to develop appropriate indicators,
• to establish defensible reef assessment protocols and survey design, and
• to establish the biological criteria, or thresholds, that will distinguish waterbodies that are impaired from those that attain their water quality goals.

All three challenges are being addressed through research conducted at EPA.

Biological Water Quality Standards: Indicators of Human Disturbance

Establishing biological water quality standards requires testing and validating measures of biological condition that represent, or indicate, the effects of human disturbance on corals. This is because the CWA is not intended to protect waterbodies from natural changes, only from changes created by human activities.

Many of the traditional biological measurements made on coral reefs have never been tested to determine whether they were good indicators of human disturbance. A good indicator for the CWA is one that is not only easily measurable and interpretable, but sensitive to the effects of human activities over natural changes.

EPA scientists have used two different approaches to test CWA indicators. In one approach, they made coral measurements in an area of high human activity, an industrial area and shipping dock in the U.S. Virgin Islands, to compare with the same measurements made progressively further away from the industrial area. Those measurements showed a positive change in condition further away from the center of disturbance, and were considered good indicators of human activity.

Using another approach, EPA scientists made the same biological measurements in the coastal zones offshore of each watershed on the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix. They also used land use maps to quantify the amount of human development (such as homes, farms, shopping malls, and roads) within each watershed. Those measurements that showed a positive increase at watersheds with lower human development were considered good indicators of human activity.

The results of these studies validated several different coral reef measurements as useful CWA indicators, some through both approaches. The validated indicators can be used to characterize coral condition and to defensibly represent the effects of human activity on corals.

Reef Assessment Surveys

Once indicators of human disturbance are identified and validated, then survey and monitoring protocols have to be developed that address the question of biological integrity as required by the CWA. There are many compromises that have to be made in a monitoring program. It is never feasible to make every measurement on every organism. This challenge is further complicated for coral reefs because measurements have to be made under water, the presence of reefs are patchy and the areas of concern are relatively large regions, like the island of St. Croix, the southern coast of Puerto Rico or the Florida Keys.

Over the course of several years, EPA scientists have developed a protocol and survey approach that allows multiple biological measurements in a manner efficient enough to sample sixty or more stations in just two weeks. Using a probability-based survey design pioneered by EPA’s Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program, data from sixty randomly-selected stations is all that is needed to represent the coral reef condition of a large region.

The sampling protocol includes measurements on reef fish, stony corals, sponges, gorgonian octocorals (soft corals), and other invertebrates, as well as documentation of coral diseases and bleaching, which are signs of stress. Many of the measurements are used to calculate indicators that represent the effects of human activity on the reef. Other measurements are used to estimate benefits of the reef to human society. For example, measurements of the size and number of stony corals can be used as indicators for fishery habitat provision, tourism opportunities or shoreline protection from storm events.

EPA scientists have applied the protocol and survey design at multiple locations, including Southeast Florida, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands and the Flower Garden Banks off the coast of Texas. Several of the protocols have been adopted by other coral reef monitoring programs, notably the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Coral Reef Monitoring Program and The Nature Conservancy’s Florida Reef Resilience Program.

Coral Reef Condition Thresholds

With data in hand from reef assessment surveys, and indicators calculated, the next step is to determine what a good condition is and what it is not. EPA scientists have convened multiple workshops with coral reef experts to examine photographs, videos and data from scores of sampling stations to develop some criteria for interpreting the data and indicators. At first the experts agreed on four categories of condition, very good, good, fair and poor. After multiple meetings, conversations and discussions they eventually agreed to as many as six levels of condition (rated 1 through 6 from high to low condition) based on the Biological Condition Gradient (BCG) which is a conceptual framework to link resource condition to the severity of human-generated stress.

Using the BCG as a conceptual backdrop, the experts were able to quantitatively describe what they expected to see in a reef with minimal human disturbance (reference conditions), how that might have changed over the last several decades (baseline shifting) and management goals for restoration of reefs that are of only fair or poor quality.

The ‘rules’ for determining whether reef condition is good or poor have been developed initially for reef fish and stony coral assemblages. For example, a reef in very good condition would have large reef-building stony corals with several species that are known to be intolerant to stressors. The same reef would be expected to have a large number of fish representing several different species and including some of the rarer species such as large groupers. These positive reef attributes would decline at reefs with poor condition and might be replaced with higher presence of macroalgae and small, or even invasive fish species.

Corals and Climate Adaptation Planning Project

The Corals and Climate Adaptation Planning (CCAP) project is a collaborative effort of the Climate Change Working Group of the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force. Co-led by EPA, NOAA, and DOI, the CCAP project aims to develop guidance and tools for improving adaptation to changing environmental conditions in coral reef management. Adaptation is the practice of making adjustments in human systems and management approaches to account for the effects of changing environmental conditions, to moderate harmful impacts and take advantage of beneficial opportunities.

For coral reefs, adaptation planning requires tailoring and testing recent, general scientific principles of ‘climate-smart design’ specifically for use in coral reef protection, restoration, and management. Design considerations come into play because climate change is not only affecting coral reefs directly (e.g., through temperature-induced coral bleaching), but it is also affecting inputs of other stressors such as land-based pollution (e.g., through alterations in precipitation and drying patterns).

This means that in order to meet management goals, it may be necessary to adjust the timing, location, or structural design of a project or action in order to ensure it is effective in the context of a changing climate. The goal of the CCAP project is to develop the knowledge, tools, and training materials that will help managers achieve successful adaptation planning and implementation.

• Research and development of a framework for climate-smart design and a compendium of strategies from the literature to aid in ‘brainstorming’ adaptation options
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• A collaborative case study using the Adaptation Design Tool to inform watershed planning in Guánica Bay, Puerto Rico
• A desktop resilience assessment of Puerto Rico’s coral reefs using an established methodology to assist with spatially targeting reef management actions
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Recent projections, delegate tracker, recent election news, scientists are using underwater speakers to help restore degraded coral reefs: study.

Corals rely on rich soundscapes to thrive, researchers have discovered.

Researchers have discovered a new method that could encourage the restoration of degraded coral reef populations, which have been declining around the world due to record-high marine temperatures.

The sounds of a healthy reef could be used to encourage coral larvae to recolonize damaged or degraded reefs, according to a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science on Tuesday. Underwater speakers that play the sounds of a healthy reef, such as fish calls, were found to help coral larvae settle at rates up to seven times higher.

Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have been recording underwater sounds from coral reefs in the Caribbean for close to a decade, Nadège Aoki, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and author of the paper, told ABC News. During that time, they observed that healthier reefs tended to have more diverse fish assemblages as well as more complex soundscapes.

Fish make sounds by strumming on their swim bladder and crunching and scraping on corals, Aoki said. Other sounds of the reef could include the crackling of snapping shrimp, according to the researchers.

"They have a sound environment that is distinctive and gives kind of an acoustic signature to the reef," Aoki said.

MORE: 'Strikingly warm' ocean heat wave off Florida coasts could decimate corals, other marine life, experts say

In their first days of life, coral larvae make a permanent decision of where they will settle and metamorphose into adults -- swimming or drifting with the currents in an effort to seek the right conditions to settle. The sounds of the reef are important settlement cues, the paper found.

Corals are immobile as adults, so the larval stage is their only opportunity to select a good habitat.

The researchers collected larvae from adult colonies of the mustard hill coral species off the coast of the U.S. Virgin Islands and re-placed them on three reefs along the southern coast of St. John -- one of which was healthy and the other two labeled as relatively degraded, with sparse coral and few fish.

The larvae were placed on the reefs' little cups in order to create a controlled environment at distances of one, five, 10 and 30 meters from the solar-powered speakers, which played the sounds of a healthy reef recorded about 10 years earlier, according to the paper.

MORE: Installation underway of 15 acres of 3D-printed artificial reefs in coastal North Carolina

After collecting the cups, the researchers found that the larvae that were placed near underwater speakers settled at a rate of about twice as much, Aoki said.

"This effect decreased as you got farther away from the speaker," she added. "Low-frequency sound appears to have an impact on their settlement behavior as well."

The experiment, sponsored by the Vere and Oceankind Foundations and the National Science Foundation, was conducted twice in the summer of 2022.

The oval-shaped larvae, about the size of a grain of rice, are covered in ciliary hairs, leading the scientists to believe they are sensing the sound waves through the epidermis, Aoki said, adding that the exact mechanism in which the corals are potentially hearing by is not yet known.

MORE: Hawaii's coral reefs are in peril. What researchers are doing to restore coral ecosystems and preserve biodiversity

The researchers embarked on the study in response to the "alarming" rates at which coral reefs are declining, Aoki said. The results of the study suggests that acoustic enrichment could be a new method to restore coral reefs, the researcher said.

Aoki believes that the method can be used in nurseries both on land and off the coast to restore coral reef populations. In addition, underwater speakers have the ability to broadcast to a large area, she said.

Reef populations off the coast of Florida and in the Caribbean experienced a large bleaching event over the summer due to record-breaking marine heatwaves. Reef populations will need all the help they can get to recover from climate change-induced stressors, Aoki said.

"We're observing thermal heating and bleaching events happening at more regular frequencies than they have in the past, and that makes it very difficult for reefs to have sufficient time to recover and grow back in between these disruptive events," she said.

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• Climate Change
• Environment

Severe hurricanes boost influx of juveniles and gene flow in a coral reef sponge

Study first to show recolonization by rope-like caribbean sponge post-storms using genetic analyses.

Named for its ropy-looking long branches, Aplysina cauliformis, a coral reef sponge, provides a critical 3D habitat for marine organisms and helps to stabilize the foundation of coral reefs. However, these upright branching sponges are highly susceptible to breaking during storms, which increases sponge fragmentation and contributes to population clonality and inbreeding.

Many sponges can survive severe damage and undergo frequent fragmentation, which is considered a mechanism for asexual reproduction. While fragmentation is a commonly utilized reproductive strategy in rope sponges, they also can reproduce sexually by producing larvae. How and whether they recolonize following extreme weather events is critical for the restoration and resilience of coral reef ecosystems.

Hurricanes Irma and Maria -- both in 2017 -- were two rapid succession storms that provided researchers from Florida Atlantic University's Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College and Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, and collaborators from the University of the Virgin Islands, the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama, with a unique opportunity to address a priority concern -- the resilience of coral reef sponge populations after severe hurricanes.

The researchers are the first to evaluate substrate recolonization by sponges in the U.S. Virgin Islands after these two catastrophic storms using genetic analyses to understand how much clonality verses sexual recruitment occurs on coral reefs post-storms. To date, studies of storm impacts have largely focused on scleractinian or stony corals.

Results of the study, published in the journal Molecular Ecology , reveal that populations of clonal marine species with low pelagic dispersion, such as A. cauliformis , may benefit from increased frequency and magnitude of hurricanes to maintain genetic diversity and combat inbreeding, enhancing the resilience of Caribbean sponge communities to extreme storm events.

The A. cauliformis population before the hurricanes was highly clonal but shifted to greater sexual reproduction for recolonization after the hurricanes, with 85 percent of sexual reproduction mainly due to local larval recruitment. Major storm events favored sponge larval recruitment but did not increase the genetic diversity.

"Branching coral populations exposed to intermediate or low storm frequencies are known to have primarily sexual populations, whereas sites with the highest storm frequencies have mostly clonal populations," said Andia Chaves Fonnegra, Ph.D., principal investigator and an assistant professor of biology in FAU's Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College and Harbor Branch. "In contrast, our findings showed greater recruitment of sexually derived sponge larvae than clones arising from fragmentation/regeneration after these extreme events, maintaining genetic diversity. Because A. cauliformis sponges reproduce both asexually via fragmentation and sexually, interactions between these mechanisms may maximize their dispersal efficiency and their likelihood of successfully recolonizing habitats."

Larval recruits (genets) and fragments (ramets) were detected at all St. Thomas sampling locations post-hurricane, indicating a potential for rapid population recovery for this species that was not affected by site physiography.

At all sites combined, 65.8 percent of the pre-hurricane adult sponges were genets compared to 85.1 percent of the post-hurricane juveniles. This suggests that recolonization of A. cauliformis after the hurricanes was largely due to sexual reproduction, with gene flow across distances up to 60 kilometers, between St. Croix and Buck Island in St. Thomas, detected among the study sites.

For the study, scuba divers collected small samples of the thin purple morphotype sponges 14 and 22 months after the two Category 5 hurricanes in St. Thomas. Researchers then extracted genomic DNA from the sponge samples using a genotyping method based on sequencing uniform fragments called 2b-RAD. This emerging method is used for mapping, population genetics, genetic mapping and estimating alleles. Genetic diversity was estimated for the pre-hurricane (adults) and post-hurricane (adults and juveniles) populations as expected (He) and observed (Ho) heterozygosities with inbreeding coefficient (FIS) and compared.

"Over short time scales, intermittent disturbances such as hurricanes can alter the structure and function of the coral reef benthic community and impact recovery time," said Chaves Fonnegra. "However, as we have demonstrated in our study, storm events don't affect all reef species equally and can promote diversity by creating open substrate for larval attachment and recruitment."

Given predictions of more frequent intense hurricanes as climate continues to change, it is likely that major disturbances such as the unprecedented landfall of the two Category 5 hurricanes in St. Thomas will continue to influence the population structure of coral reef species and their ecological interactions.

Study co-authors are Iris Segura-Garcia, Ph.D., first author and a former postdoctoral fellow in the Chaves Fonnegra Lab; Julie B. Olsen, Ph.D., a professor of biological sciences, University of Alabama; Deborah J. Gochfeld, Ph.D., principal scientist, Department of Biomolecular Studies, the University of Mississippi; and Marilyn E. Brandt, Ph.D., research associate professor, University of the Virgin Islands.

This research was funded by Chaves Fonnegra start-up funds and a National Science Foundation RAPID grant (OCE-1807807, Gochfeld, OCE-1808233, Olson and OCE1810616, Brandt).

• Ecology Research
• Marine Biology
• Mating and Breeding
• Severe Weather
• Hurricanes and Cyclones
• Coral Reefs
• Biodiversity
• Allele frequency
• Effects of global warming
• Dinoflagellate
• National Hurricane Center
• Plant sexuality

Story Source:

Materials provided by Florida Atlantic University . Original written by Gisele Galoustian. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Iris Segura‐García, Julie B. Olson, Deborah J. Gochfeld, Marilyn E. Brandt, Andia Chaves‐Fonnegra. Severe hurricanes increase recruitment and gene flow in the clonal sponge Aplysina cauliformis . Molecular Ecology , 2024; 33 (7) DOI: 10.1111/mec.17307

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Scientists are breeding 'super corals.' Can they withstand climate change?

Lauren Sommer

Ryan Kellman

Outside the city of Townsville, Australia a group of scientists is breeding 'super coral' in the hope that they might better withstand the ocean's record breaking heat levels and strengthen the Great Barrier Reef living just offshore. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

Just after the full moon, Annika Lamb goes into work late at night. She puts on a headlamp with a red light and peers into large tanks of water in a marine science lab.

It's a special week. Inside the lab, corals with delicate branching arms are about to undergo a vital ritual. Only one night a year, they release eggs and sperm that fill the water like confetti and that will combine to create the next generation of reef builders.

"You're not really sure what's going to happen," Lamb says. "There's a lot of magic. There's a lot of unknown."

One way to save coral reefs? Deep freeze them for the future

Lamb is standing by patiently to scoop up the genetic bundles, in the hope that these corals hold the key to surviving an ocean that is rapidly heating up. She's part of a team at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, located on the east coast of Australia, that is breeding corals to endure an increasingly hostile planet – what some have nicknamed "super corals."

A team from the Australian Institute of Marine Science monitors coral spawning, which occurs only at night and just once a year. Marie Roman/AIMS hide caption

Since corals only spawn at night, the red headlamps help keep the lab dark. The lights seem like sultry mood lighting for the corals–and a red alert for climate change at the same time.

During spawning corals release their eggs and sperm, filling the water like confetti, which combine to create the next generation of reef builders. Marie Roman/AIMS hide caption

Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the largest in the world, is currently undergoing its fifth mass bleaching event in the last eight years. Corals bleach, turning a ghostly white color, when they're under stress from hotter temperatures. If the heat subsides, corals can recover. But long periods of heat and repeated marine heat waves cause corals to die, wreaking havoc on one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet.

It's estimated that a quarter of all marine species depend on coral reefs. Biologists say that's a best guess, since life on reefs is so dense, it's very likely there are species yet to be discovered. Reefs are also vital for humans. Half a billion people depend on coral reefs for food, livelihoods and flood protection, since reefs can dissipate the power of waves hitting shore.

Although coral reefs take up only a small fraction of the ocean it's estimated that a quarter of all marine species depend on them. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

Reefs are vital for humans. Half a billion people depend on coral reefs for food, livelihoods and flood protection, since reefs can dissipate the power of waves hitting shore. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

If climate change continues at its current rate, the outlook for coral reefs is grim. Within a few decades, the world is expected to hit 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming on average, a threshold where the majority of the world's coral reefs are not expected to survive .

In the face of that threat, scientists around the world are searching for corals that can tolerate extreme heat better, selectively breeding them to help reefs adapt faster than nature could. The big question is how much time it will buy coral reefs, given how rapidly temperatures are rising.

"Coral reefs are amongst the most vulnerable of our ecosystems to climate change," says David Wachenfeld, research program director at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, just outside of Townsville, Queensland. "There are certainly very plausible future scenarios where, with the best science in the world, we won't be able to protect the Great Barrier Reef."

During coral bleaching the algae that live inside coral, providing them with food and their bright colors, are expelled from the coral, leaving them without their major food source. Renata Ferrari/AIMS hide caption

Putting corals to the test

The corals inside Annika Lamb's tanks are all contenders to help reefs survive, but not all of them are winners. They're labeled with a ranking, like athletes after a race. They're housed at the National Sea Simulator, a vast facility of tanks where scientists have figured out the art of keeping the delicate animals alive.

Annika Lamb looks over a tank of coral at AIMS that have been tested for their ability to handle heat. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

These ranked corals have gone through tests, placed into hotter water to see how they perform. When ocean temperatures rise, it upsets the cornerstone relationship between a coral and the algae that live inside it. The algae give the coral its color, and they also photosynthesize, making food for the coral with energy from the sun. They're essentially the roommates that do the grocery shopping.

Under stress though, those algae get expelled, turning the corals white and leaving them without their major food source. Given enough time, corals can rebuild their algae and recover. But if conditions stay hot, corals will die.

Still, bleaching doesn't happen uniformly. Corals have different sensitivities to heat, even within the same species. Lamb is looking for the individuals who seem to be able to hack it better.

"We have 25 corals here that got ranked from number one, being our most resilient coral, all the way down to 25, which was our most thermally sensitive coral," she says, peering into the tank.

During spawning, Lamb and colleagues carefully scoop up the eggs and sperm from the corals and mix them in different combinations. Just days afterward, the tiny coral babies are swimming around in glass tanks, each group the result of a different pairing of moms and dads.

Still, creating a heat-tolerant "super coral" isn't as simple as combining the top-ranked parents. The babies of #1 and #2 could be rock stars when it gets hot, but they may fall short when it comes to other stressors a coral has to survive.

"Are they also able to withstand winter temperatures?" Lamb says. "Are they also able to compete with other corals on the reef? Can we maintain enough genetic diversity so that population has enough tools at its disposal to deal with different environments?"

Selective breeding has been used by humans for millennia on crops and livestock. Now, as the climate gets hotter, it's being used for conservation. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

As a result, Lamb says they're trying out all combinations of parents. And once the babies grow, are putting them onto the Great Barrier Reef to see how they survive in the wild. Other corals they're testing out are being crossbred, where two different species are combined to create hybrids. The hope is to breed heat-tolerant corals that can one day be used to restore reefs as the damage from climate change gets worse.

Selective breeding is a technique that's been used by humanity for centuries, responsible for everything from the fruits and vegetables at the grocery store to the dogs and cats in our homes. It's been used much less in the field of conservation, but as the toll of climate change has become apparent, more biologists are looking into "assisted evolution."

"When we're talking about assisted evolution, we're trying to take those natural processes and speed them up, in the way that would naturally occur on the reef," Lamb says.

Coral larvae swim under a microscope.

Credit: AIMS

Super corals aren't a super solution

Many coral biologists cringe at the term "super coral" for a simple reason: no amount of biological tweaking can produce corals that will survive the future climate that humans are creating. Breeding corals is about buying extra time until humans can get climate change under control.

"We cannot just keep making the climate warmer, and it will all be okay because we can bioengineer everything," says Madeleine van Oppen, senior principal research scientist at AIMS who leads the coral breeding work. "So we really see this as an intermediate solution to try and not lose the reef until we deal with the climate."

The stakes became painfully clear in Florida and the Caribbean in 2023, when the ocean temperatures broke records. The heat was so intense, some corals died outright, even before they had the chance to bleach. Less than a quarter of one sensitive species, staghorn coral, was left alive. Some of the corals that were lost had been grown specifically to restore the reef.

Muhammad Azmi Abdul Wahab holds one of the devices that budding coral colonies are attached to before being placed in the ocean. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

"In my mind, it brought home the message that we really need to restore with thermally-enhanced coral stock, because otherwise a lot of effort might be wasted," van Oppen says.

Still, some coral scientists worry that focusing on projects like coral breeding could harm the broader effort to rein in climate change.

"They send the subliminal message that the clever scientists can fix this, when in reality the only way we're going to fix it is by reducing greenhouse gas emissions," says Terry Hughes, coral scientist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia.

Hughes says given the massive scale of the Great Barrier Reef, stretching over 1,000 miles, the amount of corals that could be grown in tanks onshore would only make up a tiny fraction of the reef. He says the most vital solution is ending the use of fossil fuels, like coal and oil, and switching to renewable energy.

"It's in our hands as a global society to determine the trajectory of the world's coral reefs and where it ends up," Hughes says. "There's still time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions very sharply."

The corals developed at AIMS are being tested in the ocean, placed by divers on the central Great Barrier Reef as part of a large field trial. Saskia Jurriaans/ AIMS hide caption

Before super corals can be used to restore reefs, they're being studied in small trials on the Great Barrier Reef. Eventually, regulators would need to determine if deploying them would pose any risk to the wild coral populations. And to grow huge numbers of them, massive aquarium facilities would need to be built.

"As scientists we can't just fix everything, but we can develop the tools for tomorrow that give reefs and the people that depend upon them the best fighting chance possible," Wachenfeld says. "And that's what gets me out of bed every morning."

Coral scientists know the clock is against them, given how rapidly the oceans are warming.

"It is sort of depressing when you get a year like this and you see so much mortality," van Oppen says. "You do worry: can we get there on time?"

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• Great Barrier Reef
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Coral research finds bleaching impedes reproduction and hinders recovery

by Australian Institute of Marine Science

Bleaching can suppress reproduction in a common coral species found in the Great Barrier Reef, hampering future reef replenishment, new research led by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and James Cook University (JCU) has identified.

The research on populations of a branching stony coral (Acropora millepora) in Woppaburra sea Country of the Keppel Islands near Yeppoon, highlights the importance of overlooked impacts of bleaching events and how they can impede recovery.

The research is published as aerial surveys undertaken by AIMS and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) have confirmed a fifth mass coral bleaching event since 2016 unfolding across the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The work is published in the journal Coral Reefs .

Aerial surveys over the Keppel Islands in February observed extensive bleaching in nearshore areas consistent with increased sea surface temperatures and accumulated heat exposure in the wider southern region. In-water surveys conducted by AIMS are continuing in order to assess the severity of the bleaching.

Lead author Nico Briggs said his study found a 21% decrease in the reproductive output of Acropora millepora despite apparent recovery and low mortality after the 2020 mass bleaching event.

"Coral bleaching isn't always a death sentence for every coral. Corals can and do recover if stress inducing conditions subside. But our research shows there is a price to pay for recovery in terms of a coral's reproductive capacity, which is a critical driver of post-disturbance replenishment on coral reefs," Mr. Briggs said.

"We are seeing more frequent and severe bleaching events driven by climate change on the Great Barrier Reef and reefs worldwide. Our findings add to the mounting evidence that surviving coral populations are facing an increasingly uphill battle for recovery, in part due to sublethal impacts of bleaching events."

Mr. Briggs and his co-authors collected samples from almost 100 Acropora millepora colonies that were known to have bleached in the 2020 event and survived. The samples were collected six months after the bleaching and just before the annual coral spawning event in late October.

In dissecting the samples, the scientists found the number eggs produced within coral polyps decreased by 21% in colonies that had bleached severely, despite visual recovery, or return of the corals' color.

Recent in-water work by AIMS scientists included collecting samples from these corals to understand how the colonies have responded to this latest bleaching. More samples will be collected prior to the annual coral spawning later in the year.

Co-author Dr. Cathie Page said understanding how bleaching affects coral reproduction is a vital step towards improving predictions of reef trajectories under a warming climate.

"We know that the corals in Woppaburra sea Country are tough and resilient. There was little mortality after the 2020 bleaching event, despite these corals being exposed to accumulated heat stress that often results in mortality," she said.

"Their resilience is partly to do with environmental conditions in the region, with tides and currents helping to reduce water temperatures, provide sun protection and deliver extra food. But as this research shows, they paid a price for their recovery.

"The impact of bleaching on reproduction is likely to vary among coral species. Understanding this will help us to know what these reefs may look like in five to 10 years time, helping us to target interventions."

Mr. Briggs added the paper also highlighted the importance of a multi-faceted approach to helping coral reefs under a changing climate.

"Typical assessments of coral health after a bleaching event consist of surveys to determine how much coral lived or died, but these surveys miss longer-term impacts to health, such as impacts to reproduction and growth.

"The best chance for coral reefs to persist into the future requires a strong reduction in global greenhouse emissions to stabilize temperatures, best practice management of local pressures, and the development of innovative interventions to help boost climate tolerance and resilience for coral reefs," he said.

Journal information: Coral Reefs

Provided by Australian Institute of Marine Science

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Artificial reef designed by MIT engineers could protect marine life, reduce storm damage

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The beautiful, gnarled, nooked-and-crannied reefs that surround tropical islands serve as a marine refuge and natural buffer against stormy seas. But as the effects of climate change bleach and break down coral reefs around the world, and extreme weather events become more common, coastal communities are left increasingly vulnerable to frequent flooding and erosion.

An MIT team is now hoping to fortify coastlines with “architected” reefs — sustainable, offshore structures engineered to mimic the wave-buffering effects of natural reefs while also providing pockets for fish and other marine life.

The team’s reef design centers on a cylindrical structure surrounded by four rudder-like slats. The engineers found that when this structure stands up against a wave, it efficiently breaks the wave into turbulent jets that ultimately dissipate most of the wave’s total energy. The team has calculated that the new design could reduce as much wave energy as existing artificial reefs, using 10 times less material.

The researchers plan to fabricate each cylindrical structure from sustainable cement, which they would mold in a pattern of “voxels” that could be automatically assembled, and would provide pockets for fish to explore and other marine life to settle in. The cylinders could be connected to form a long, semipermeable wall, which the engineers could erect along a coastline, about half a mile from shore. Based on the team’s initial experiments with lab-scale prototypes, the architected reef could reduce the energy of incoming waves by more than 95 percent.

“This would be like a long wave-breaker,” says Michael Triantafyllou, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Professor in Ocean Science and Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “If waves are 6 meters high coming toward this reef structure, they would be ultimately less than a meter high on the other side. So, this kills the impact of the waves, which could prevent erosion and flooding.”

Details of the architected reef design are reported today in a study appearing in the open-access journal PNAS Nexus . Triantafyllou’s MIT co-authors are Edvard Ronglan SM ’23; graduate students Alfonso Parra Rubio, Jose del Aguila Ferrandis, and Erik Strand; research scientists Patricia Maria Stathatou and Carolina Bastidas; and Professor Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms; along with Alexis Oliveira Da Silva at the Polytechnic Institute of Paris, Dixia Fan of Westlake University, and Jeffrey Gair Jr. of Scinetics, Inc.

Leveraging turbulence

Some regions have already erected artificial reefs to protect their coastlines from encroaching storms. These structures are typically sunken ships, retired oil and gas platforms, and even assembled configurations of concrete, metal, tires, and stones. However, there’s variability in the types of artificial reefs that are currently in place, and no standard for engineering such structures. What’s more, the designs that are deployed tend to have a low wave dissipation per unit volume of material used. That is, it takes a huge amount of material to break enough wave energy to adequately protect coastal communities.

The MIT team instead looked for ways to engineer an artificial reef that would efficiently dissipate wave energy with less material, while also providing a refuge for fish living along any vulnerable coast.

“Remember, natural coral reefs are only found in tropical waters,” says Triantafyllou, who is director of the MIT Sea Grant. “We cannot have these reefs, for instance, in Massachusetts. But architected reefs don’t depend on temperature, so they can be placed in any water, to protect more coastal areas.”

The new effort is the result of a collaboration between researchers in MIT Sea Grant, who developed the reef structure’s hydrodynamic design, and researchers at the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), who worked to make the structure modular and easy to fabricate on location. The team’s architected reef design grew out of two seemingly unrelated problems. CBA researchers were developing ultralight cellular structures for the aerospace industry, while Sea Grant researchers were assessing the performance of blowout preventers in offshore oil structures — cylindrical valves that are used to seal off oil and gas wells and prevent them from leaking.

The team’s tests showed that the structure’s cylindrical arrangement generated a high amount of drag. In other words, the structure appeared to be especially efficient in dissipating high-force flows of oil and gas. They wondered: Could the same arrangement dissipate another type of flow, in ocean waves?

The researchers began to play with the general structure in simulations of water flow, tweaking its dimensions and adding certain elements to see whether and how waves changed as they crashed against each simulated design. This iterative process ultimately landed on an optimized geometry: a vertical cylinder flanked by four long slats, each attached to the cylinder in a way that leaves space for water to flow through the resulting structure. They found this setup essentially breaks up any incoming wave energy, causing parts of the wave-induced flow to spiral to the sides rather than crashing ahead.

“We’re leveraging this turbulence and these powerful jets to ultimately dissipate wave energy,” Ferrandis says.

Standing up to storms

Once the researchers identified an optimal wave-dissipating structure, they fabricated a laboratory-scale version of an architected reef made from a series of the cylindrical structures, which they 3D-printed from plastic. Each test cylinder measured about 1 foot wide and 4 feet tall. They assembled a number of cylinders, each spaced about a foot apart, to form a fence-like structure, which they then lowered into a wave tank at MIT. They then generated waves of various heights and measured them before and after passing through the architected reef.

“We saw the waves reduce substantially, as the reef destroyed their energy,” Triantafyllou says.

The team has also looked into making the structures more porous, and friendly to fish. They found that, rather than making each structure from a solid slab of plastic, they could use a more affordable and sustainable type of cement.

“We’ve worked with biologists to test the cement we intend to use, and it’s benign to fish, and ready to go,” he adds.

They identified an ideal pattern of “voxels,” or microstructures, that cement could be molded into, in order to fabricate the reefs while creating pockets in which fish could live. This voxel geometry resembles individual egg cartons, stacked end to end, and appears to not affect the structure’s overall wave-dissipating power.

“These voxels still maintain a big drag while allowing fish to move inside,” Ferrandis says.

The team is currently fabricating cement voxel structures and assembling them into a lab-scale architected reef, which they will test under various wave conditions. They envision that the voxel design could be modular, and scalable to any desired size, and easy to transport and install in various offshore locations. “Now we’re simulating actual sea patterns, and testing how these models will perform when we eventually have to deploy them,” says Anjali Sinha, a graduate student at MIT who recently joined the group.

Going forward, the team hopes to work with beach towns in Massachusetts to test the structures on a pilot scale.

“These test structures would not be small,” Triantafyllou emphasizes. “They would be about a mile long, and about 5 meters tall, and would cost something like 6 million dollars per mile. So it’s not cheap. But it could prevent billions of dollars in storm damage. And with climate change, protecting the coasts will become a big issue.”

This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

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