Genomic models predict successful coral adaptation if future ocean warming rates are reduced

Bay, Rachael A.; Rose, Noah H.; Logan, Cheryl A.; Palumbi, Stephen R.

doi:10.1126/sciadv.1701413

Cited by 178 publications

(200 citation statements)

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“…Recent work has begun to model the potential for evolutionary rescue, but coupling these predictions with spatially explicit environmental predictions and appropriate biological parameters is difficult. Bay, Rose, Logan, and Palumbi () added to data from previous studies on the presence and frequency of heat‐correlated alleles in Acropora hyacinthus across a broad spatial gradient to compare genomic models. The authors show that distant populations in American Samoa and Raratonga from moderate conditions had a lower frequency of heat‐correlated alleles than corals from thermally challenging sites in American Samoa.…”

Section: The Adaptive Capacity Of Coralsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilience in reef‐building corals: The ecological and evolutionary importance of the host response to thermal stress

Drury

2020

Molecular Ecology

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Coral reefs are under extreme threat due to a number of stressors, but temperature increases due to changing climate are the most severe. Rising ocean temperatures coupled with local extremes lead to extensive bleaching, where the coral‐algal symbiosis breaks down and corals may die, compromising the structure and function of reefs. Although the symbiotic nature of the coral colony has historically been a focus of research on coral resilience, the host itself is a foundational component in the response to thermal stress. Fixed effects in the coral host set trait baselines through evolutionary processes, acting on many loci of small effect to create mosaics of thermal tolerance across latitudes and individual coral reefs. These genomic differences can be strongly heritable, producing wide variation among clones of different genotypes or families of a specific larval cross. Phenotypic plasticity is overlaid on these baselines and a growing body of knowledge demonstrates the potential for acclimatization of reef‐building corals through a variety of mechanisms that promote resilience and stress tolerance. The long‐term persistence of coral reefs will require many of these mechanisms to adjust to warmer temperatures within a generation, bridging the gap to reproductive events that allow recombination of standing diversity and adaptive change. Business‐as‐usual climate scenarios will probably lead to the loss of some coral populations or species in the future, so the interaction between intragenerational effects and evolutionary pressure is critical for the survival of reefs.

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Section: The Adaptive Capacity Of Coralsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilience in reef‐building corals: The ecological and evolutionary importance of the host response to thermal stress

Drury

2020

Molecular Ecology

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“…Unlike on land where many long-lived animals have limited capacity for rapid evolution because of long generation times and low genetic diversity (Romiguier et al, 2014), even long-lived corals may show adaptability. Bay et al (2017b) estimated evolutionary rates in A. hyacinthus in the face of warming ocean temperatures by examining a high latitude population in the Cook Islands for the same putative warm-adapted alleles found in the more equatorial Samoa archipelago. Under a multi-locus model in which a colony's inherent thermal tolerance was proportional to the number of heat tolerant alleles it had inherited, they could project the Cook Island population's level of heat adaptation under various climate scenarios.…”

Section: Evolution In the Face Of Environmental Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanisms of Thermal Tolerance in Reef-Building Corals across a Fine-Grained Environmental Mosaic: Lessons from Ofu, American Samoa

et al. 2018

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Environmental heterogeneity gives rise to phenotypic variation through a combination of phenotypic plasticity and fixed genetic effects. For reef-building corals, understanding the relative roles of acclimatization and adaptation in generating thermal tolerance is fundamental to predicting the response of coral populations to future climate change. The temperature mosaic in the lagoon of Ofu, American Samoa, represents an ideal natural laboratory for studying thermal tolerance in corals. Two adjacent back-reef pools approximately 500 m apart have different temperature profiles: the highly variable (HV) pool experiences temperatures that range from 24.5 to 35 • C, whereas the moderately variable (MV) pool ranges from 25 to 32 • C. Standardized heat stress tests have shown that corals native to the HV pool have consistently higher levels of bleaching resistance than those in the MV pool. In this review, we summarize research into the mechanisms underlying this variation in bleaching resistance, focusing on the important reef-building genus Acropora. Both acclimatization and adaptation occur strongly and define thermal tolerance differences between pools. Most individual corals shift physiology to become more heat resistant when moved into the warmer pool. Lab based tests show that these shifts begin in as little as a week and are equally sparked by exposure to periodic high temperatures as constant high temperatures. Transcriptome-wide data on gene expression show that a wide variety of genes are co-regulated in expression modules that change expression after experimental heat stress, after acclimatization, and even after short term environmental fluctuations. Population genetic scans show associations between a corals' thermal environment and its alleles at 100s to 1000s of nuclear genes and no single gene confers strong environmental effects within or between species. Symbionts also tend to differ between pools and species, and the thermal tolerance of a coral is a reflection of individual host genotype and specific symbiont types. We conclude the review by placing this work in the context of parallel research going on in other species, reefs, and ecosystems around the world and into the broader framework of reef coral resilience in the face of climate change.

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“…Precisely quantifying thermal tolerance is further complicated by the contribution of both environmental and genetic components (Bay, Rose, Logan, & Palumbi, ; Camp, Schoepf, & Suggett, ; Dixon et al, ; Torda et al, ); these mechanisms are also likely to be influenced by connectivity patterns (Kleypas et al, ). A natural extension of our study would be to recalculate TST and DHW based on different assumptions regarding coral adaptive capacity as a proxy for genetic adaptation, community shifts, and larval dispersal to see how coral decline in the CT would be subsequently altered relative to our current results.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extreme temperature events will drive coral decline in the Coral Triangle

McManus

Vasconcelos

Levin

et al. 2020

Global Change Biology

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In light of rapid environmental change, quantifying the contribution of regional‐ and local‐scale drivers of coral persistence is necessary to characterize fully the resilience of coral reef systems. To assess multiscale responses to thermal perturbation of corals in the Coral Triangle (CT), we developed a spatially explicit metacommunity model with coral–algal competition, including seasonal larval dispersal and external spatiotemporal forcing. We tested coral sensitivity in 2,083 reefs across the CT region and surrounding areas under potential future temperature regimes, with and without interannual climate variability, exploring a range of 0.5–2.0°C overall increase in temperature in the system by 2054. We found that among future projections, reef survival probability and mean percent coral cover over time were largely determined by the presence or absence of interannual sea surface temperature (SST) extremes as well as absolute temperature increase. Overall, reefs that experienced SST time series that were filtered to remove interannual variability had approximately double the chance of survival than reefs subjected to unfiltered SST. By the end of the forecast period, the inclusion of thermal anomalies was equivalent to an increase of at least 0.5°C in SST projections without anomalies. Change in percent coral cover varied widely across the region within temperature scenarios, with some reefs experiencing local extinction while others remaining relatively unchanged. Sink strength and current thermal stress threshold were found to be significant drivers of these patterns, highlighting the importance of processes that underlie larval connectivity and bleaching sensitivity in coral networks.

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Genomic models predict successful coral adaptation if future ocean warming rates are reduced

Abstract: Population genomic simulations predict coral adaptation only under mitigated climate change scenarios.

Cited by 178 publications

References 49 publications

Resilience in reef‐building corals: The ecological and evolutionary importance of the host response to thermal stress

Resilience in reef‐building corals: The ecological and evolutionary importance of the host response to thermal stress

Mechanisms of Thermal Tolerance in Reef-Building Corals across a Fine-Grained Environmental Mosaic: Lessons from Ofu, American Samoa

Extreme temperature events will drive coral decline in the Coral Triangle

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