Coral diseases are characterized by microbial community shifts in coral mucus and tissue, but causes and consequences of these changes are vaguely understood due to the complexity and dynamics of coral-associated bacteria. We used 16S rRNA gene microarrays to assay differences in bacterial assemblages of healthy and diseased colonies displaying White Plague Disease (WPD) signs from two closely ...

Coral mortality has increased in recent decades, making coral recruitment more important than ever in sustaining coral reef ecosystems and contributing to their resilience. This review summarizes existing information on ecological factors affecting scleractinian coral recruitment. Successful recruitment requires the survival of coral offspring through sequential life history stages. Larval avai...

The erosive action of rivers and seas has immense influence on the appearance of the physical landscape. However, the creation of several important river and coastal features are not available in terrain creation software and systems. We have designed algorithms to easily create these features, namely (1) river meanders, (2) river deltas, (3) coastal cliffs, and (4) beaches. A terrain that does...

Coral skeletal boron isotopes have been established as a proxy for seawater pH, yet it remains unclear if and how this proxy is affected by seawater temperature. Specifically, it has never been directly tested whether coral bleaching caused by high water temperatures influences coral boron isotopes. Here we report the results from a controlled bleaching experiment conducted on the Caribbean cor...

Corals are very efficient at using solar radiation, with photosynthetic quantum efficiencies approaching theoretical limits. Here, we investigated potential mechanisms underlying such outstanding photosynthetic performance through extracting inherent optical properties of the living coral tissue and skeleton in a massive faviid coral. Using Monte Carlo simulations developed for medical tissue o...

Wave exposure can influence community structure and distribution of shallow coral reefs, by affecting organisms both directly and indirectly. To assess the current stony coral community condition under different degrees of wave exposure at a marine protected area of the Gulf of Cazones (SW Cuba), two expeditions were carried out in May 2010 and June 2012. Four sampling sites were sampled at ree...

In recent decades, coral reef ecosystems have declined to the extent that reefs are now threatened globally. While many water quality parameters have been proposed to contribute to reef declines, little evidence exists conclusively linking specific water quality parameters with increased disease prevalence in situ. Here we report evidence from in situ coral health surveys confirming that chroni...

based on the morphology and corallites structures, seventeen species of scleractinian corals in seven families were described from the chabahar bay, fourteen species of which are being reported for the first time from this bay. the identified species include  acropora valida dana, 1846,  acropora clathrata brook, 1891 and  acropora nausta dana, 1846 belonging to acroporidae, favia matthai vaugh...

Abstract Different bacterial community profiles were observed on the soft coral Dendronephthya sp. and an inanimate reference site using terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis of bacterial community DNA. To correlate the observation with a chemical defense mechanism against bacterial epibiosis, antibacterial effects of coral tissue extracts and waterborne products of coral-a...