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Coral community resilience to successive years of bleaching in Kāne‘ohe Bay, Hawai‘i
- Source :
- Coral Reefs. 39:757-769
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2020.
-
Abstract
- The Hawaiian Islands are at the northern edge of coral reef distributions, and corals found there are exposed to large seasonal temperature changes. Historically, coral bleaching in the Hawaiian Islands was extremely rare and had only occurred in 1996. However, in the summers of both 2014 and 2015, successive bleaching events occurred in Kāne‘ohe Bay, O‘ahu. Seawater temperatures were above 28 °C for approximately 1 month in 2014 and 3 months in 2015 and peaked above 30 °C in both years. Patterns of bleaching did not vary among the three sites within Kāne‘ohe Bay. Severe bleaching and paling covered 77 and 55% of reefs in 2014 and 2015, respectively. Different species showed a range of susceptibility with 80–100% of Pocillopora spp. bleaching in both years, but less than 50% bleaching of Porites compressa and Montipora capitata in Kāne‘ohe Bay. Less than 1% of the encrusting coral Leptastrea purpurea colonies bleached in both years. Sixty individual colonies of P. compressa and M. capitata and 28 colonies of Pocillopora damicornis were tagged and monitored for rates of bleaching, recovery and mortality throughout the two-year period. Most of the colonies that bleached recovered their symbionts within 3–4 months, though P. compressa visually recovered more rapidly than M. capitata and P. damicornis. Cumulatively, 19% of P. damicornis, 10% of M. capitata and no P. compressa died by May 2016. Partial mortality within a colony did not occur in 2014, but impacted 13% of the colonies in 2015, with P. damicornis and M. capitata having higher rates of partial mortality than P. compressa. Relatively, low susceptibility in the dominant species and low rates of mortality combined with rapid rates of recovery show coral resilience to anomalously high temperatures in Kāne‘ohe Bay, O‘ahu.
- Subjects :
- 0106 biological sciences
Montipora capitata
geography
geography.geographical_feature_category
biology
Porites compressa
Coral bleaching
010604 marine biology & hydrobiology
Coral
Zoology
Coral reef
Pocillopora damicornis
Aquatic Science
biology.organism_classification
010603 evolutionary biology
01 natural sciences
Pocillopora
Bay
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14320975 and 07224028
- Volume :
- 39
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Coral Reefs
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi...........b538749e7d7450d53c513414c84cbb28