Project: Collaborative research: Coral community resilience: testing the role of hidden diversity in pocilloporid corals at Moorea

NSF Award Abstract:
While most coral reefs in the world are threatened by multiple disturbances that are driving coral cover downward, the coral reefs at Mo'orea, French Polynesia, provide a striking exception. However, it is not yet clear what makes the coral communities of Mo'orea an exception to the trend of global decline in coral cover, and what drives spatial variation in recovery patterns around the island. The most recent wave of recovery on the outer reefs is dominated by corals in the genus Pocillopora (the cauliflower coral). While the colonies of this coral all look similar to one another, they actually represent multiple 'hidden' species that are genetically divergent but visibly indistinguishable. The morphological similarity makes it hard to identify species in the field, and this often forces researchers to pool these corals into a single group, which has impeded a full understanding of coral recovery. The ecological differences among these hidden species remain poorly understood, but they may be a crucial factor keeping the ecosystem in a coral-dominated state. This project is studying how 'hidden diversity' provides a form of 'ecological insurance' that provides reef-building coral communities around this island with ecological and evolutionary options that buffer reefs from unpredictable and unfavorable environmental conditions. If multiple cryptic species exhibit a diversity of responses to disturbance and stress, then it increases the ability of the community to recover and re-organize after impacts compared to that if all the species responded the same way. By studying the reefs at Mo'orea, this project provides unique, important, and transferable knowledge to better understand fundamental mechanism driving coral community recovery following catastrophic damage, and will provide much-needed information to better manage coral reefs and favor them remaining in a coral-dominated state. A PhD student and a postdoctoral researcher at Florida State University (FSU) are being supported and mentored during the project, and a program of professional growth is being provided for a technician who will work on the project. The investigators are working with science educators from Florida schools to introduce marine biology clubs that will provide outreach opportunities for FSU and California State University Northridge participants to engage high school students and teachers in the research themes at the core of this project.

This project will test the hypothesis that the presence of morphologically similar yet genetically divergent lineages of corals in the genus Pocillopora drives rapid recovery of coral communities dominated by Pocillopora on the outer reefs of Mo'orea, French Polynesia. By creating a diverse portfolio in the capacity of the Pocillopora community to recover and reorganize after disturbance, hidden ecological differences among coral lineages in their response to disturbance is expected to promote community resilience. A well-studied genetic marker will be used to distinguish coral colonies among different lineages. Field-based projects, co-located with Moorea Coral Reef-Long-Term Ecological Research (MCR-LTER) sites, will determine how pocilloporid lineages differ in their distribution and abundance, spatial and temporal patterns of annual recruitment, symbiont composition, and post-settlement growth and survival. These data will be used to build Integral Projection Models (IPMs) to compare population differences among lineages in their sensitivity to size-dependent perturbations, and their capacity for population growth following disturbance. Results from the field projects and IPMs will be synthesized to estimate response diversity as the multivariate dispersion of lineage dissimilarity, and to assess the extent to which it predicts variation among sites in the recovery rate of pocilloporid percent cover, estimated empirically from the MCR-LTER time series. The intellectual merits of this project lie in developing new and transferable understanding of: i) the ecological differences within an ecologically important coral genus, ii) why pocilloporids at Mo'orea are an exception to the global trend of declining coral cover, and iii) the potential for hidden response diversity to act as a fundamental mechanism determining the capacity for coral communities to reestablish and reorganize following disturbances.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.