Rapid coral mortality following doldrums-like conditions on

Coral bleaching can be induced by many different stressors, however, the most common cause of mass bleaching in the field is high sea temperatures (SST). Here, we describe an unusual bleaching event that followed very calm sea conditions combined with higher than average sea surface temperatures (SST). Patterns of mortality differed from typical thermal bleaching in four ways: 1) mortality was very rapid; 2) the suite of species most affected was different; 3) tissue mortality in spp. was often restricted to the center of the colony; Acropora 4) the event occurred early in the summer. The two weeks prior to the event included 8 days where the average wind speed was less than 3 ms . In addition, SSTs in the weeks preceding this event were 1.0-1.5°C higher than the mean for the last 30 years. We hypothesize that the lack of water movement induced by low wind speeds combined with high SST to cause colonies anoxic stress resulting in this unusual bleaching event. Andrew H Baird ( ) Corresponding author: [email protected] : Conceptualization, Data Curation, Funding Acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Validation, Writing – Author roles: Baird AH Original Draft Preparation; : Conceptualization, Funding Acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – Review & Editing; : Keith SA Woolsey E Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – Review & Editing; : Investigation, Writing – Review & Editing; : Yoshida R Naruse T Conceptualization, Data Curation, Investigation, Resources, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Review & Editing Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Baird AH, Keith SA, Woolsey E How to cite this article: et al. Rapid coral mortality following doldrums-like conditions on Iriomote, Japan 2017, :1728 (doi: ) [version 1; referees: 1 approved with reservations] F1000Research 6 10.12688/f1000research.12660.1 © 2017 Baird AH . This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the , which Copyright: et al Creative Commons Attribution Licence permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This work was funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CE140100020) and Grant information: VILLUM FONDEN (10114). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. 22 Sep 2017, :1728 (doi: ) First published: 6 10.12688/f1000research.12660.1 1 2,3 4 5