Hurricane-driven patterns of clonality in an ecosystem engineer: The Caribbean coral Montastraea annularis.
K-selected species with low rates of sexual recruitment may utilise storage effects where low adult mortality allows a number of individuals to persist through time until a favourable recruitment period occurs. Alternative methods of recruitment may become increasingly important for such species if...
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ftunivamstpubl:oai:uvapub:399724 2023-05-15T17:51:33+02:00 Hurricane-driven patterns of clonality in an ecosystem engineer: The Caribbean coral Montastraea annularis. N.L. Foster I.B. Baums J.A. Sanchez C.B. Paris I. Chollett C.L. Agudelo M.J.A. Vermeij P.J. Mumby 2013 http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.399724 en eng 10.1371/journal.pone.0053283 It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content licence (like Creative Commons). PLoS One (19326203) vol.8 (2013) nr.1 p.e53283 article 2013 ftunivamstpubl 2015-11-19T11:40:04Z K-selected species with low rates of sexual recruitment may utilise storage effects where low adult mortality allows a number of individuals to persist through time until a favourable recruitment period occurs. Alternative methods of recruitment may become increasingly important for such species if the availability of favourable conditions for sexual recruitment decline under rising anthropogenic disturbance and climate change. Here, we test the hypotheses that asexual dispersal is an integral life history strategy not only in branching corals, as previously reported, but also in a columnar, ‘K-selected’ coral species, and that its prevalence is driven by the frequency of severe hurricane disturbance. Montastraea annularis is a long-lived major frame-work builder of Caribbean coral reefs but its survival is threatened by the consequences of climate induced disturbance, such as bleaching, ocean acidification and increased prevalence of disease. 700 M. annularis samples from 18 reefs within the Caribbean were genotyped using six polymorphic microsatellite loci. We demonstrate that asexual reproduction occurs at varying frequency across the species-range and significantly contributes to the local abundance of M. annularis, with its contribution increasing in areas with greater hurricane frequency. We tested several competing hypotheses that might explain the observed pattern of genotypic diversity. 64% of the variation in genotypic diversity among the sites was explained by hurricane incidence and reef slope, demonstrating that large-scale disturbances combine with local habitat characteristics to shape the balance between sexual and asexual reproduction in populations of M. annularis. Article in Journal/Newspaper Ocean acidification Universiteit van Amsterdam: Digital Academic Repository (UvA DARE) |
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Open Polar |
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Universiteit van Amsterdam: Digital Academic Repository (UvA DARE) |
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ftunivamstpubl |
language |
English |
description |
K-selected species with low rates of sexual recruitment may utilise storage effects where low adult mortality allows a number of individuals to persist through time until a favourable recruitment period occurs. Alternative methods of recruitment may become increasingly important for such species if the availability of favourable conditions for sexual recruitment decline under rising anthropogenic disturbance and climate change. Here, we test the hypotheses that asexual dispersal is an integral life history strategy not only in branching corals, as previously reported, but also in a columnar, ‘K-selected’ coral species, and that its prevalence is driven by the frequency of severe hurricane disturbance. Montastraea annularis is a long-lived major frame-work builder of Caribbean coral reefs but its survival is threatened by the consequences of climate induced disturbance, such as bleaching, ocean acidification and increased prevalence of disease. 700 M. annularis samples from 18 reefs within the Caribbean were genotyped using six polymorphic microsatellite loci. We demonstrate that asexual reproduction occurs at varying frequency across the species-range and significantly contributes to the local abundance of M. annularis, with its contribution increasing in areas with greater hurricane frequency. We tested several competing hypotheses that might explain the observed pattern of genotypic diversity. 64% of the variation in genotypic diversity among the sites was explained by hurricane incidence and reef slope, demonstrating that large-scale disturbances combine with local habitat characteristics to shape the balance between sexual and asexual reproduction in populations of M. annularis. |
format |
Article in Journal/Newspaper |
author |
N.L. Foster I.B. Baums J.A. Sanchez C.B. Paris I. Chollett C.L. Agudelo M.J.A. Vermeij P.J. Mumby |
spellingShingle |
N.L. Foster I.B. Baums J.A. Sanchez C.B. Paris I. Chollett C.L. Agudelo M.J.A. Vermeij P.J. Mumby Hurricane-driven patterns of clonality in an ecosystem engineer: The Caribbean coral Montastraea annularis. |
author_facet |
N.L. Foster I.B. Baums J.A. Sanchez C.B. Paris I. Chollett C.L. Agudelo M.J.A. Vermeij P.J. Mumby |
author_sort |
N.L. Foster |
title |
Hurricane-driven patterns of clonality in an ecosystem engineer: The Caribbean coral Montastraea annularis. |
title_short |
Hurricane-driven patterns of clonality in an ecosystem engineer: The Caribbean coral Montastraea annularis. |
title_full |
Hurricane-driven patterns of clonality in an ecosystem engineer: The Caribbean coral Montastraea annularis. |
title_fullStr |
Hurricane-driven patterns of clonality in an ecosystem engineer: The Caribbean coral Montastraea annularis. |
title_full_unstemmed |
Hurricane-driven patterns of clonality in an ecosystem engineer: The Caribbean coral Montastraea annularis. |
title_sort |
hurricane-driven patterns of clonality in an ecosystem engineer: the caribbean coral montastraea annularis. |
publishDate |
2013 |
url |
http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.399724 |
genre |
Ocean acidification |
genre_facet |
Ocean acidification |
op_source |
PLoS One (19326203) vol.8 (2013) nr.1 p.e53283 |
op_relation |
10.1371/journal.pone.0053283 |
op_rights |
It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content licence (like Creative Commons). |
_version_ |
1766158731810177024 |