A Vicious Circle? Altered Carbon and Nutrient Cycling May Explain the Low Resilience of Caribbean Coral Reefs
نویسنده
چکیده
470 BioScience • June 2016 / Vol. 66 No. 6 http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org BioScience 66: 470–476. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. doi:10.1093/biosci/biw047 Advance Access publication 11 March 2016 A Vicious Circle? Altered Carbon and Nutrient Cycling May Explain the Low Resilience of Caribbean Coral Reefs
منابع مشابه
Effect of light and nutrient availability on the release of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) by Caribbean turf algae
Turf algae increasingly dominate benthic communities on coral reefs. Given their abundance and high dissolved organic carbon (DOC) release rates, turf algae are considered important contributors to the DOC pool on modern reefs. The release of photosynthetically fixed carbon as DOC generally, but not always, increases with increased light availability. Nutrient availability was proposed as an ad...
متن کاملA review of bottom-up vs. top-down control of sponges on Caribbean fore-reefs: what’s old, what’s new, and future directions
Interest in the ecology of sponges on coral reefs has grown in recent years with mounting evidence that sponges are becoming dominant members of reef communities, particularly in the Caribbean. New estimates of water column processing by sponge pumping activities combined with discoveries related to carbon and nutrient cycling have led to novel hypotheses about the role of sponges in reef ecosy...
متن کاملCan a thermally tolerant symbiont improve the future of Caribbean coral reefs?
The detrimental effect of climate change induced bleaching on Caribbean coral reefs has been widely documented in recent decades. Several studies have suggested that increases in the abundance of thermally tolerant endosymbionts may ameliorate the effect of climate change on reefs. Symbionts that confer tolerance to temperature also reduce the growth rate of their coral host. Here, we show, usi...
متن کاملCoral mucus fuels the sponge loop in warm- and cold-water coral reef ecosystems
Shallow warm-water and deep-sea cold-water corals engineer the coral reef framework and fertilize reef communities by releasing coral mucus, a source of reef dissolved organic matter (DOM). By transforming DOM into particulate detritus, sponges play a key role in transferring the energy and nutrients in DOM to higher trophic levels on Caribbean reefs via the so-called sponge loop. Coral mucus m...
متن کاملReef flattening effects on total richness and species responses in the Caribbean.
There has been ongoing flattening of Caribbean coral reefs with the loss of habitat having severe implications for these systems. Complexity and its structural components are important to fish species richness and community composition, but little is known about its role for other taxa or species-specific responses. This study reveals the importance of reef habitat complexity and structural com...
متن کامل