Environmental controls on modern scleractinian coral and reef-scale calcification

Environmental controls on modern scleractinian coral and reef-scale calcification

Modern reef-building corals sustain a wide range of ecosystem services because of their ability to build calcium carbonate reef systems. The influence of environmental variables on coral calcification rates has been extensively studied, but our understanding of their relative importance is limited by the absence of in situ observations and the ability to decouple the interactions between differ...

Decadal-scale changes in abundance of non-scleractinian invertebrates on a Caribbean coral reef

Declining coral calcification on the Great Barrier Reef.

Reef-building corals are under increasing physiological stress from a changing climate and ocean absorption of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. We investigated 328 colonies of massive Porites corals from 69 reefs of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia. Their skeletal records show that throughout the GBR, calcification has declined by 14.2% since 1990, predominantly because extension...

Environmental Controls on Corallite Morphology in the Reef Coral Montastraea Annularis

Scleractinian reef-coral species display high phenotypic plasticity in skeletal morphology. Understanding environmental and physiologic controls on this variation is essential to explaining the distribution and abundance of coral species as well as understanding their susceptibility to pollution and global climate change. Here we assess phenotypic plasticity in the corallite morphology of genet...

Effect of light and temperature on calcification and strontium uptake in the scleractinian coral Acropora verweyi

Strontium thermometry has been suggested as a powerful tool for reconstructing seawater surface temperature (SST). In corals, an inverse relationship between SST and skeletal Sr/Ca ratios has been found. However, this ratio might also vary with calcification, which in turn is dependent on light and temperature. The aim of this study was to improve our knowledge of the uptake of Sr2+ as a functi...