Census of heat tolerance among Florida's threatened staghorn corals finds resilient individuals throughout existing nursery populations.

The rapid loss of reef-building corals owing to ocean warming is driving the development of interventions such as coral propagation and restoration, selective breeding and assisted gene flow. Many of these interventions target naturally heat-tolerant individuals to boost climate resilience, but the challenges of quickly and reliably quantifying heat tolerance and identifying thermotolerant individuals have hampered implementation. Here, we used coral bleaching automated stress systems to perform rapid, standardized heat tolerance assays on 229 colonies of Acropora cervicornis across six coral nurseries spanning Florida's Coral Reef, USA. Analysis of heat stress dose-response curves for each colony revealed a broad range in thermal tolerance among individuals (approx. 2.5°C range in Fv/Fm ED50), with highly reproducible rankings across independent tests (r = 0.76). Most phenotypic variation occurred within nurseries rather than between them, pointing to a potentially dominant role of fixed genetic effects in setting thermal tolerance and widespread distribution of tolerant individuals throughout the population. The identification of tolerant individuals provides immediately actionable information to optimize nursery and restoration programmes for Florida's threatened staghorn corals. This work further provides a blueprint for future efforts to identify and source thermally tolerant corals for conservation interventions worldwide.

Different disease inoculations cause common responses of the host immune system and prokaryotic component of the microbiome in Acropora palmata.

Reef-building corals contain a complex consortium of organisms, a holobiont, which responds dynamically to disease, making pathogen identification difficult. While coral transcriptomics and microbiome communities have previously been characterized, similarities and differences in their responses to different pathogenic sources has not yet been assessed. In this study, we inoculated four genets of the Caribbean branching coral Acropora palmata with a known coral pathogen (Serratia marcescens) and white band disease. We then characterized the coral's transcriptomic and prokaryotic microbiomes' (prokaryiome) responses to the disease inoculations, as well as how these responses were affected by a short-term heat stress prior to disease inoculation. We found strong commonality in both the transcriptomic and prokaryiomes responses, regardless of disease inoculation. Differences, however, were observed between inoculated corals that either remained healthy or developed active disease signs. Transcriptomic co-expression analysis identified that corals inoculated with disease increased gene expression of immune, wound healing, and fatty acid metabolic processes. Co-abundance analysis of the prokaryiome identified sets of both healthy-and-disease-state bacteria, while co-expression analysis of the prokaryiomes' inferred metagenomic function revealed infected corals' prokaryiomes shifted from free-living to biofilm states, as well as increasing metabolic processes. The short-term heat stress did not increase disease susceptibility for any of the four genets with any of the disease inoculations, and there was only a weak effect captured in the coral hosts' transcriptomic and prokaryiomes response. Genet identity, however, was a major driver of the transcriptomic variance, primarily due to differences in baseline immune gene expression. Despite genotypic differences in baseline gene expression, we have identified a common response for components of the coral holobiont to different disease inoculations. This work has identified genes and prokaryiome members that can be focused on for future coral disease work, specifically, putative disease diagnostic tools.