Spontaneous Branching in a Polyp Oriented Model of Stony Coral Growth

Phototropic growth in a reef flat acroporid branching coral species.

Many terrestrial plants form complex morphological structures and will alter these growth patterns in response to light direction. Similarly reef building corals have high morphological variation across coral families, with many species also displaying phenotypic plasticity across environmental gradients. In particular, the colony geometry in branching corals is altered by the frequency, locati...

A Field Key to the Identification of Tropical Western Atlantic Zooxanthellate Octocorals (Octocorallia: Cnidaria)

—Despite their abundance and ecological importance, octocorals have received relatively little taxonomic attention compared to scleractinian (stony) corals. Identification of octocoral species is often difficult and ambiguous, and requires thorough microscopic examination of skeletal components (sclerites). Here, we provide a key for field identification—no microscope required—of 51 zooxanthell...

Stony coral species diversity and cover in the Florida Keys using design-based sampling

Large-scale sampling of stony coral species richness, species distribution, and cover was undertaken at 423 Florida Keys sites between Miami and SW of Key West during 2005 and 2007. A two-stage, stratified random sampling design employed belt transects to enumerate numbers of species and point-intercept surveys to quantify cover. The sampling design incorporated ten reef and hard-bottom habitat...

2. General Background on Corals and Coral Reefs

2.1.1 Taxonomy and morphology of scleractinian corals Stony corals are marine invertebrates in the phylum Cnidaria (Coelenterata) that secrete a calcium carbonate skeleton. Cnidaria is the only phylum that is diploblastic (i.e., two-tissue layers); all higher taxa are triploblastic (three-tissue layers) and thus contain a true mesoderm. The phylum is named Cnidaria because organisms use cnidae ...

A corrosive concoction: The combined effects of ocean warming and acidification on the early growth of a stony coral are multiplicative