Low recruitment due to altered settlement substrata as primary constraint for coral communities under ocean acidification

ORCID Identifiers

0000-0001-7671-4358

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Publication Date

9-13-2017

Abstract

© 2017 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved. The future of coral reefs under increasing CO2 depends on their capacity to recover from disturbances. To predict the recovery potential of coral communities that are fully acclimatized to elevated CO2, we compared the relative success of coral recruitment and later life stages at two volcanic CO2 seeps and adjacent control sites in Papua New Guinea. Our field experiments showed that the effects of ocean acidification (OA) on coral recruitment rates were up to an order of magnitude greater than the effects on the survival and growth of established corals. Settlement rates, recruit and juvenile densities were best predicted by the presence of crustose coralline algae, as opposed to the direct effects of seawater CO2. Offspring from high CO2 acclimatized parents had similarly impaired settlement rates as offspring from control parents. For most coral taxa, field data showed no evidence of cumulative and compounding detrimental effects of high CO2 on successive life stages, and three taxa showed improved adult performance at high CO2 that compensated for their low recruitment rates. Our data suggest that severely declining capacity for reefs to recover, due to altered settlement substrata and reduced coral recruitment, is likely to become a dominant mechanism of how OA will alter coral reefs.

ISSN

0962-8452

Publisher

Royal Society Publishing

Volume

284

Issue

1862

First Page

20171536

Disciplines

Life Sciences

Keywords

Carbon dioxide, Climate change, Coral reproduction, Crustose coralline algae, Reef resilience, Scleractinian corals

Scopus ID

85029620749

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Bronze: This publication is openly available on the publisher’s website but without an open license

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