Extended breeding seasons and asynchronous spawning among equatorial reef corals in Kenya

Seasonal reproduction in equatorial reef corals

J.R. GUEST1*, A.H. BAIRD2, B.P.L. GOH3 and L.M. CHOU4 School of Biology and Psychology, Division of Biology, King George VI Building, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, NE1 7RU, UK Tel. +44 (791) 374-1557; email: [email protected] Centre for Coral Reef Biodiversity, Department of Marine Biology, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD 4811, Australia Natural Sciences, National...

Equatorial decline of reef corals during the last Pleistocene interglacial.

The Last Interglacial (LIG; ca. 125,000 y ago) resulted from rapid global warming and reached global mean temperatures exceeding those of today. The LIG thus offers the opportunity to study how life may respond to future global warming. Using global occurrence databases and applying sampling-standardization, we compared reef coral diversity and distributions between the LIG and modern. Latitudi...

In situ Rates of Fertilization Among Broadcast Spawning Gorgonian Corals.

Fertilization rates among marine benthic taxa have implicitly been assumed to be uniformly high in most analyses of life history evolution, but in situ fertilization rates during natural spawning events are rarely measured. Fertilization rates of the Caribbean gorgonians Plexaura kuna and Pseudoplexaura porosa were measured at a site in the San Blas Islands, Panama, by collecting eggs downstrea...

Spawning synchrony in scleractinian corals: Comment on Mangubhai & Harrison (2008)

Mangubhai & Harrison (2008; Mar Ecol Prog Ser 360:85–96) documented spawning patterns in an equatorial assemblage of Acropora spp. in Kenya over a 2 yr period. They concluded that reproductive seasons are more protracted at low latitudes and that ‘mass spawning’ does not occur in equatorial regions, due to a breakdown in spawning synchrony among species. However, this interpretation hinges on t...

Phosphomonoesterases in Reef-Building Corals.