Pocillopora corals, the dominant reef-builders in the Eastern Tropical Pacific, exhibit a high level of phenotypic plasticity, making the interpretation of morphological variation and the identification of species challenging. To test the hypothesis that different coral morphospecies represent phenotypes that develop in different flow conditions, we compared branch characters in three Pocillopora morphospecies (P. damicornis, P. verrucosa, and P. meandrina) from two communities in the Gulf of California exposed to contrasting flow conditions. Morphological variation and branch modularity (i.e., the tendency of different sets of branch traits to vary in a coordinated way) were assessed in colonies classified as Pocillopora type 1 according to two mitochondrial regions. Our results can be summarized as follows. (1) Pocillopora type 1 morphospecies corresponded to a pattern of morphological variation in the Gulf of California. Overall, P. damicornis had the thinnest branches and its colonies the highest branch density, followed by P. verrucosa, and then by P. meandrina, which had the thickest branches and its colonies the lowest branch density. (2) The differentiation among morphospecies was promoted by different levels of modularity of traits. P. verrucosa had the highest coordination of traits, followed by P. damicornis, and P. meandrina. (3) The variation and modularity of branch traits were related to water flow condition. Morphology under the high-flow condition was more similar among morphospecies than under the low-flow condition and seemed to be related to mechanisms for coping with these conditions. Our results provide the first evidence that in scleractinian corals different levels of modularity can be promoted by different environmental conditions.
This study is the first description of the residency and diel movements of Sphyrna lewini at the Revillagigedo National Park, Mexico. Eleven adult scalloped hammerheads of total length 200-300 cm were monitored using acoustic telemetry during 2013-2015 at four sites at San Benedicto Island. Diel and residency patterns were described based on 58,055 detections by four autonomous receivers. The sharks dis-
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.