Marked annual coral bleaching resilience of an inshore patch reef in the Florida Keys: A nugget of hope, aberrance, or last man standing?
dc.contributor.author
dc.date.accessioned
2019-09-20T09:32:23Z
dc.date.available
2019-09-20T09:32:23Z
dc.date.issued
2018-06-01
dc.identifier.issn
0722-4028
dc.identifier.uri
dc.description.abstract
Annual coral bleaching events, which are predicted to occur as early as the next decade in the Florida Keys, are expected to cause catastrophic coral mortality. Despite this, there is little field data on how Caribbean coral communities respond to annual thermal stress events. At Cheeca Rocks, an inshore patch reef near Islamorada, FL, the condition of 4234 coral colonies was followed over 2 yr of subsequent bleaching in 2014 and 2015, the two hottest summers on record for the Florida Keys. In 2014, this site experienced 7.7 degree heating weeks (DHW) and as a result 38.0% of corals bleached and an additional 36.6% were pale or partially bleached. In situ temperatures in summer of 2015 were even warmer, with the site experiencing 9.5 DHW. Despite the increased thermal stress in 2015, only 12.1% of corals were bleached in 2015, which was 3.1 times less than 2014. Partial mortality dropped from 17.6% of surveyed corals to 4.3% between 2014 and 2015, and total colony mortality declined from 3.4 to 1.9% between years. Total colony mortality was low over both years of coral bleaching with 94.7% of colonies surviving from 2014 to 2016. The reduction in bleaching severity and coral mortality associated with a second stronger thermal anomaly provides evidence that the response of Caribbean coral communities to annual bleaching is not strictly temperature dose dependent and that acclimatization responses may be possible even with short recovery periods. Whether the results from Cheeca Rocks represent an aberration or a true resilience potential is the subject of ongoing research
dc.format.mimetype
application/pdf
dc.language.iso
eng
dc.publisher
Springer Verlag
dc.relation.isformatof
Reproducció digital del document publicat a: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-018-1678-x
dc.relation.ispartof
Coral Reefs, 2018, vol. 37, núm. 2, p. 533-547
dc.relation.ispartofseries
Articles publicats (D-ATC)
dc.rights
Attribution 4.0 International
dc.rights.uri
dc.title
Marked annual coral bleaching resilience of an inshore patch reef in the Florida Keys: A nugget of hope, aberrance, or last man standing?
dc.type
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
dc.rights.accessRights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.type.version
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
dc.identifier.doi
dc.identifier.idgrec
029061
dc.type.peerreviewed
peer-reviewed
dc.identifier.eissn
1432-0975