Journal
ECOLOGY
Volume 95, Issue 6, Pages 1663-1673Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1890/13-0468.1
Keywords
coral bleaching; coral mortality; depth refuge; eastern Tropical Pacific; El Nino-Southern Oscillation; extinction; Holocene; Millepora; refuge
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Funding
- Biological Oceanography Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation
- STRI Pre-doctoral Fellowship
- University of Miami
- Lana Vento Charitable Trust
- NSF Virgin Islands Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research
- Smithsonian Institution Marine Science Network
- Geological Society of America
- American Museum of Natural History's Lerner Gray Fund
- EPSCoR
- Office Of The Director [0814417] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Species intolerant of changing climate might avoid extinction within refugia buffered from extreme conditions. Refugia have been observed in the fossil record but are not well documented or understood on ecological time scales. Using a 37-year record from the eastern Pacific across the two most severe El Nino events on record (1982-1983 and 1997-1998) we show how an exceptionally thermally sensitive reef-building hydrocoral, Millepora intricata, twice survived catastrophic bleaching in a deeper-water refuge (>11 m depth). During both events, M. intricata was extirpated across its range in shallow water, but showed recovery within several years, while two other hydrocorals without deep-water populations were driven to regional extinction. Evidence from the subfossil record in the same area showed shallow-water persistence of abundant M. intricata populations from 5000 years ago, through severe El Nino-Southern Oscillation cycles, suggesting a potential depth refugium on a millennial timescale. Our data confirm the deep refuge hypothesis for corals under thermal stress.
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