Climate change has recently been implicated in poleward shifts of many tropical species including corals; thus attention focused on higher-latitude coral communities is warranted to investigate possible range expansions and ecosystem shifts due to global warming. As the northern extension of the Florida Reef Tract (FRT), the third-largest barrier reef ecosystem in the world, southeast Florida (...

Climate change has emerged as a principal threat to coral reefs, and is expected to exacerbate coral reef degradation caused by more localised stressors. Management of local stressors is widely advocated to bolster coral reef resilience, but the extent to which management of local stressors might affect future trajectories of reef state remains unclear. This is in part because of limited unders...

AIM Coral reef communities occurring in deeper waters have received little research effort compared to their shallow-water counterparts, and even such basic information as their location and extent are currently unknown throughout most of the world. Using the Great Barrier Reef as a case study, habitat suitability modelling is used to predict the distribution of deep-water coral reef communitie...

Recurrent disturbances can have a critical effect on the structure and function of coral reef communities. In this study, long-term changes were examined in the hard coral community at Wanlitung, in southern Taiwan, between 1985 and 2010. In this 26 year interval, the reef has experienced repeated disturbances that include six typhoons and two coral-bleaching events. The frequency of disturbanc...

Coral reefs are declining worldwide as a result of many anthropogenic disturbances. This trend is alarming because coral reefs are hotspots of marine biodiversity and considered the ‘rainforests of the sea. As in the rainforest, much of the diversity on a coral reef is cryptic, remaining hidden among the cracks and crevices of structural taxa. Although the cryptofauna make up the majority of a ...

Global climate change and local anthropogenic stressors have been identified as primary causes for coral reef degradation and are targets of research to assess anthropogenic impacts (Aronson & Precht, 2006; Crabbe, 2010; Fung et al., 2011;Muthukrishnan & Fong, 2014). The first scientific observation of a coral-algal phase shift (Figure 1), which is defined as a transition from coral to algal do...

The importance of seagrass beds and mangroves as juvenile habitats for coral reef fishes is still debatable. We hypothesised that the configuration of these habitats in the marine landscape in relation to the coral reef would influence accessibility from the reef (both for fishes that use these habitats for shelter or feeding, and their predators). In combination with differences in habitat com...

We integrated coral reef connectivity data for the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico into a conservation decision-making framework for designing a regional scale marine protected area (MPA) network that provides insight into ecological and political contexts. We used an ocean circulation model and regional coral reef data to simulate eight spawning events from 2008-2011, applying a maximum 30-day pe...

We studied removal rates of plankton and total particulate organic nitrogen (PON) by benthic reef communities from the overlying water in a large experimental flume. The flume was filled with mixtures of coral and coral rubble, and biomass of plankton was measured as water was recirculated over the experimental benthic community. All planktonic particle types, picoplankton, nanoplankton, microp...

Citation: Daniels CA, Baumgarten S, Yum LK, Michell CT, Bayer T, Arif C, Roder C, Weil E and Voolstra CR (2015) Metatranscriptome analysis of the reef-building coral Orbicella faveolata indicates holobiont response to coral disease. Front. Mar. Sci. 2:62. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2015.00062 Metatranscriptome analysis of the reef-building coral Orbicella faveolata indicates holobiont response to coral...