Disturbances that result in the mass mortality of reef-building corals are changing the appearance of reefs worldwide. Many reefs are transitioning away from scleractinian-coraldominated assemblages to benthic communities composed primarily of non-scleractinian taxa. This study evaluated recovery patterns of reef communities in the Florida Keys following the mortality associated with the 1997/1998 El Niño. We examined temporal trends among the 5 most spatially abundant reef taxa and stony coral species from 1999 to 2009 at 3 spatial scales, and applied a Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA) to determine whether changes in their cover resulted in a shift in community structure. Trends of decreasing stony coral cover were not identified Keys-wide between 1999 and 2009, but 2 of the 3 habitats examined -shallow and deep forereefs -did show a significant decline in cover. Concomitantly, octocoral cover significantly increased Keys-wide and in all 3 habitats. The transition to octocorals was most evident on shallow forereefs, where octocoral cover significantly increased at 9 of 12 reefs and overwhelmingly influenced the PCoA. On deep forereefs, octocoral and sponge cover did significantly increase, but did not impart a clearly defined shift in community structure like that observed on shallow forereefs. Community composition at patch reefs was relatively consistent during the study, but the increase in octocoral cover may accelerate further following a cold-water mortality event in 2010. These results demonstrate that octocorals are emerging as the predominant benthic taxa in the Florida Keys. Although the transition to octocorals may have started long ago, their apparent resilience to present-day stressors will likely allow this shift to continue into the foreseeable future.
Over the last half century, climate change, coral disease, and other anthropogenic disturbances have restructured coral‐reef ecosystems on a global scale. The disproportionate loss of once‐dominant, reef‐building taxa has facilitated relative increases in the abundance of “weedy” or stress‐tolerant coral species. Although the recent transformation of coral‐reef assemblages is unprecedented on ecological timescales, determining whether modern coral reefs have truly reached a novel ecosystem state requires evaluating the dynamics of reef composition over much longer periods of time. Here, we provide a geologic perspective on the shifting composition of Florida's reefs by reconstructing the millennial‐scale spatial and temporal variability in reef assemblages using 59 Holocene reef cores collected throughout the Florida Keys Reef Tract (FKRT). We then compare the relative abundances of reef‐building species in the Holocene reef framework to data from contemporary reef surveys to determine how much Florida's modern reef assemblages have diverged from long‐term baselines. We show that the composition of Florida's reefs was, until recently, remarkably stable over the last 8000 yr. The same corals that have dominated shallow‐water reefs throughout the western Atlantic for hundreds of thousands of years, Acropora palmata, Orbicella spp., and other massive coral taxa, accounted for nearly 90% of Florida's Holocene reef framework. In contrast, the species that now have the highest relative abundances on the FKRT, primarily Porites astreoides and Siderastrea siderea, were rare in the reef framework, suggesting that recent shifts in species assemblages are unprecedented over millennial timescales. Although it may not be possible to return coral reefs to pre‐Anthropocene states, our results suggest that coral‐reef management focused on the conservation and restoration of the reef‐building species of the past, will optimize efforts to preserve coral reefs, and the valuable ecosystem services they provide into the future.
The Florida Keys are periodically exposed to extreme cold-water events that can have pronounced effects on coral reef community structure. In January 2010, the Florida Keys experienced one of the coldest 12-day periods on record, during which water temperatures decreased below the lethal limit for many tropical reef taxa for several consecutive days. This study provides a quantitative assessment of the scleractinian mortality and acute changes to benthic cover at four patch reefs in the middle and upper Keys that coincided with this cold-water event. Significant decreases in benthic cover of scleractinian corals, gorgonians, sponges, and macroalgae were observed between summer 2009 and February 2010. Gorgonian cover declined from 25.6 ± 4.6% (mean ± SE) to 13.3 ± 2.7%, scleractinian cover from 17.6 ± 1.4% to 10.7 ± 0.9%, macroalgal cover from 8.2 ± 5.2% to 0.7 ± 0.3%, and sponge cover from 3.8 ± 1.4% to 2.3 ± 1.2%. Scleractinian mortality varied across sites depending upon the duration of lethal temperatures and the community composition. Montastraea annularis complex cover was reduced from 4.4 ± 2.4% to 0.6 ± 0.2%, and 93% of all colonies surveyed suffered complete or partial mortality. Complete or partial mortality was also observed in [50% of all Porites astreoides and Montastraea cavernosa colonies and resulted in a significant reduction in cover. When compared with historical accounts of cold-water-induced mortality, our results suggest that the 2010 winter mortality was one of the most severe on record.The level of coral mortality on patch reefs is of particular concern because corals in these habitats had previously demonstrated resistance against stressors (e.g., disease and warm-water bleaching) that had negatively affected corals in other habitats in the Florida Keys during recent decades.
Organismal and community‐wide responses of reef‐building corals are documented before and after a severe cold‐water thermal anomaly that occurred in 2010 in the Florida Keys, USA. In January 2010 seawater temperatures dropped far below the normal minima (to <11°C), resulting in the largest documented coral mass mortality event ever recorded in the Florida Keys. Physiological measurements demonstrated species‐specific thermal sensitivities to this environmental perturbation. Four common corals with narrow thermal tolerance, Acropora cervicornis, Orbicella annularis, O. faveolata, and Porites astreoides, sustained high mortality (>80%) on inshore reefs. In contrast, another common coral with a wide thermal tolerance, Siderastrea siderea, was not affected by this cold anomaly. We measured biomass, symbiotic algal densities (genus: Symbiodinium), chlorophyll a content, and maximum quantum efficiency of photosystem II for reef‐building corals on a seasonal basis before and after the 2010 cold anomaly. Our data document a clear correspondence between physiological response, biomass levels, and survivorship among these five scleractinian coral species. These physiological findings are mirrored by in‐shore benthic community monitoring data, which show the dramatic loss of the three cold‐sensitive species and continued survival of the cold‐tolerant species. Finally, we document recruitment and survival rates of newly settled reef‐building corals on four inshore reefs, which experienced high coral mortality during the 2010 cold‐kill. Interestingly, both a cold‐tolerant species, S. siderea, and a cold‐intolerant species, P. astreoides, were the most abundant species recruiting to these postdisturbance reefs.
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