Positive genetic associations among fitness traits support evolvability of a reef-building coral under multiple stressors.

Climate change threatens organisms in a variety of interactive ways that requires simultaneous adaptation of multiple traits. Predicting evolutionary responses requires an understanding of the potential for interactions among stressors and the genetic variance and covariance among fitness-related traits that may reinforce or constrain an adaptive response. Here we investigate the capacity of Acropora millepora, a reef-building coral, to adapt to multiple environmental stressors: rising sea surface temperature, ocean acidification, and increased prevalence of infectious diseases. We measured growth rates (weight gain), coral color (a proxy for Symbiodiniaceae density), and survival, in addition to nine physiological indicators of coral and algal health in 40 coral genets exposed to each of these three stressors singly and combined. Individual stressors resulted in predicted responses (e.g., corals developed lesions after bacterial challenge and bleached under thermal stress). However, corals did not suffer substantially more when all three stressors were combined. Nor were trade-offs observed between tolerances to different stressors; instead, individuals performing well under one stressor also tended to perform well under every other stressor. An analysis of genetic correlations between traits revealed positive covariances, suggesting that selection to multiple stressors will reinforce rather than constrain the simultaneous evolution of traits related to holobiont health (e.g., weight gain and algal density). These findings support the potential for rapid coral adaptation under climate change and emphasize the importance of accounting for corals' adaptive capacity when predicting the future of coral reefs.

Disentangling causation: complex roles of coral-associated microorganisms in disease.

Rapidly changing climate regimes combined with other anthropogenic pressures are implicated in increased disease epizootics among reef building corals, resulting in changing habitat structure. These accumulated stressors directly contribute to disease outbreaks by compromising the coral host immune system, modulating virulence of microbial pathogens and/or disrupting the balance within the microbiome of the holobiont. Disentangling coral disease causation has been challenging, and while progress has been made for certain diseases in terms of the roles the associated microorganisms play, it is evident that like in other marine or terrestrial systems, compromised host health cannot always be attributed to a single causative agent. Here, we summarize the current state in knowledge of microbial induced coral diseases, and discuss challenges and strategies to further disentangle disease causation. With the major environmental pressures coral reefs face over the next century, understanding interactions between host, environmental and microbial causative agent(s) that lead to disease, is still a priority to enable development of effective strategies for building resilience into coral populations.

An Indo-Pacific coral spawning database.

The discovery of multi-species synchronous spawning of scleractinian corals on the Great Barrier Reef in the 1980s stimulated an extraordinary effort to document spawning times in other parts of the globe. Unfortunately, most of these data remain unpublished which limits our understanding of regional and global reproductive patterns. The Coral Spawning Database (CSD) collates much of these disparate data into a single place. The CSD includes 6178 observations (3085 of which were unpublished) of the time or day of spawning for over 300 scleractinian species in 61 genera from 101 sites in the Indo-Pacific. The goal of the CSD is to provide open access to coral spawning data to accelerate our understanding of coral reproductive biology and to provide a baseline against which to evaluate any future changes in reproductive phenology.