Decadal Change in the Population of Dendrogyra cylindrus (Scleractinia: Meandrinidae) in Old Providence and St. Catalina Islands, Colombian Caribbean

Bernal-Sotelo, Katherine; Acosta, Alberto; Cortés, Jorge

doi:10.3389/fmars.2018.00513

Cited by 10 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 40 publications

(58 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…White plague was documented during 12% of observations, with seasonal peaks of 40% and 42% prevalence in 2014 and 2015 respectively. In comparison, observations on a D. cylindrus population in Colombia documented white disease incidence of 9.4% in January 2002 and 1.5% in October 2012 (Bernal-Sotelo et al 2019).…”

Section: Sources Of Mortalitymentioning

confidence: 88%

“…It was also listed as Threatened by the state of Florida in 2011 and, like all stony corals on the Florida Reef Tract, is protected under Florida's Coral Reef Protection Act and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's Marine Life Rule, which prohibits take, injury, or destruction of stony corals. However, population information on D. cylindrus throughout its range has been scarce, and with one exception in Colombia (Bernal-Sotelo et al 2019), population assessments, stressors, and trends have remained largely undocumented.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Rapid Population Decline of the Pillar CoralDendrogyra cylindrusAlong the Florida Reef Tract

Neely

Lewis

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Coral reefs worldwide are in a state of decline, but the status of populations and stressors for rare species are generally not well documented using broad-scale monitoring protocol. We fatetracked all known colonies of the pillar coral Dendrogyra cylindrus on the Florida Reef Tract from 2013 -2020 to assess the population and document the impacts of chronic and acute stressors. Large average colony size, an absence of juveniles, and large geographic distances between genotypes suggest that the Florida D. cylindrus population has been reproductively extinct for decades. During the study period, low-intensity chronic stressors were balanced by regrowth, while back-to-back years of coral bleaching and thermally-exacerbated disease led to declines that the subsequent years of recovery suggest would take 11 uninterrupted years to overcome. The most recent stressor on Florida's D. cylindrus population is "stony coral tissue loss disease." Following the appearance of the disease in Florida in 2015, it resulted in unrecoverable losses to the D. cylindrus population as tissue, colonies, and whole genotypes were driven to extinction. Losses of 91% of coral tissue, 88% of colonies, and 73% of genotypes between 2014 and early 2020 have led to functional extinction of D. cylindrus on the Florida Reef Tract.

show abstract

Section: Sources Of Mortalitymentioning

confidence: 88%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rapid Population Decline of the Pillar CoralDendrogyra cylindrusAlong the Florida Reef Tract

Neely

Lewis

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Habitat characterization at each site was assessed qualitatively according to the habitat type, habitat condition and geomorphological unit. Habitat type was based on the main substrate and dominance of benthic species following Croquer et al (2016) and Bernal-Sotelo et al (2019). This rapid characterization is suitable for rough descriptions of the coral benthic communities at spatial scales above 50 m (Hill and Wilkinson, 2004) as in this study.…”

Section: Habitat Characterizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The pillar coral Dendrogyra cylindrus is a rare reef building species with a high amount of evolutionary history (Curnick et al, 2015). D. cylindrus is restricted to the Caribbean basin (Aronson et al, 2008;Finney et al, 2010) and exhibits a combination of life history traits that makes it prone to local extinctions ((Marhaver et al, 2015;Bernal-Sotelo et al, 2019)). Until recently, knowledge on the species was scarce for the entirety of its global range (Aronson et al, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However there still are important knowledge gaps that need be filled to guide effective conservation action for the global species population. For the past fifteen years, the abundance of Dendrogyra cylindrus has only been quantitatively assessed in less than 15% of its distribution range (Bruckner and Bruckner, 2006;Clark et al, 2009;Riegl et al, 2009;Rodríguez-Martínez et al, 2010;Neely et al, 2013;Marhaver et al, 2015;Kabay, 2016;Bernal-Sotelo et al, 2019). Most of the status knowledge is limited to the north edge of the species distribution range in Florida (Chan et al, 2019;Kabay, 2016;Neely et al, 2013Neely et al, , 2018Neely and Lewis, 2020), the Seaflower Biosphere Reserve in Providencia island, off the coast of Nicaragua in the Colombian Caribbean (Acosta and Acevedo, 2006;Bernal-Sotelo et al, 2019) and…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Status of the pillar coralDendrogyra cylindrusin Los Roques National Park, Southern Caribbean

Cavada-Blanco

Cappelletto

Agudo-Adriani

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Information on the status of the pillar coral Dendrogyra cylindrus across its global distribution range is needed to plan and implement effective conservation interventions at both the national and regional level. Knowledge on the species distribution and abundance on the southernmost edge of its range was limited to qualitative data gathered in the 1980s. In 2014, we started using local ecological knowledge and extensive surveys to assess the status of the pillar coral in Archipelago Los Roques National Park, Venezuela; also evaluating the species representativeness within the MPA according to the level of protection established by the park’s zoning. Between 2014 and 2016, we recorded over 1,000 colonies-the highest abundance reported to date for the species- within 14 different habitat types. Disease, bleaching and partial mortality prevalence were below 4%. Size frequency distribution was uni-modal for the MPA and dominated by medium size colonies (40cm -70cm height) suggesting potential for intrinsic population growth. However, the structure of size classes varied among reefs (Pseudo-F=2.70, p=0.03), indicating asynchronous dynamics mostly driven by reef-scale processes. Overall, our results indicate that Los Roques could be a stronghold for the species. But, to maintain the conservation value for coral reefs and the pillar coral, the MPA’s zoning designation needs to be urgently revised and the extension of its high-protection zones expanded to increase habitat redundancy as well as the singular habitats composed by thickets of Acropora cervicornis and mounds of Madracis sp. This work confirms the species as extant in one of the four localities within its national range in Venezuela. However, further research on genetic diversity and connectivity among reefs within the MPA is needed to estimate effective population size and assess viability.

show abstract

Over three decades, a classic winner starts to lose in a Caribbean coral community

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The biological world is rapidly changing following decades of anthropogenic disturbances.Under these conditions, species with stable or increasing abundances have been described as winners with the potential for future success, but this assertion is unreliable without knowledge of the selective basis of winning. The incentive to find winners is acute for reef corals, for which large declines in abundance have motivated restoration efforts targeting winning corals. On Caribbean reefs, Porites astreoides has emerged as a potential winner, but the demographic basis of this categorization is poorly known. Here we test for demographic benchmarks of winning in this species by quantifying abundances and sizes of colonies over 28 yr on the south coast of St. John, US Virgin Islands. From 1992 to 2001, the density of colonies of P. astreoides showed little variation while colonies increased in size by 58%, but from 2002 to 2019, population density increased 2.7-fold, and colony size declined by 41%; accompanying these trends, the mean absolute cover of Porites spp. declined by 46% from 2010 to 2019. Low recruitment and rising abundances of colonies ≤4 cm diameter suggest that partial mortality and fission depressed colony sizes. The reversal over three decades of a positive demographic trend for a ubiquitous coral underscores the challenges of identifying winners from short-term population performance. Without a mechanistic understanding of fitness, the search for winners based on demographic trends may be futile.

show abstract

Decadal Change in the Population of Dendrogyra cylindrus (Scleractinia: Meandrinidae) in Old Providence and St. Catalina Islands, Colombian Caribbean

Cited by 10 publications

References 40 publications

Rapid Population Decline of the Pillar CoralDendrogyra cylindrusAlong the Florida Reef Tract

Rapid Population Decline of the Pillar CoralDendrogyra cylindrusAlong the Florida Reef Tract

Status of the pillar coralDendrogyra cylindrusin Los Roques National Park, Southern Caribbean

Over three decades, a classic winner starts to lose in a Caribbean coral community

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About