Journal
BIOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 4, Issue 5, Pages 490-493Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2008.0249
Keywords
reef corals; hydrodynamic disturbance; assemblage structure; seawater acidification
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Funding
- National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and the Interdisciplinary Study of Coastal Oceans (PISCO) both at the University of California Santa Barbara
- Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University, Australia
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- David and Lucile Packard Foundation
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Increasingly severe storms and weaker carbonate materials associated with more acidic oceans will increase the vulnerability of reef corals to mechanical damage. Mechanistic predictions based on measurements of colony mechanical vulnerability and future climate scenarios demonstrate dramatic shifts in assemblage structure following hydrodynamic disturbances, including switches in species' dominance on the reef and thus potential for post-disturbance recovery. Larger colonies are more resistant to factors such as disease and competition for space, and complex morphologies support more associated reef species. Future reefs are thus expected to have lower colony abundances and be dominated by small and morphologically simple, yet mechanically robust species, which will in turn support lower levels of whole-reef biodiversity than do present-day reefs.
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