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    Standardized short-term bleaching assays resolve differences in coral thermotolerance across microhabitat reef sites

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    Name:
    MS Thesis_Gabriela Perna_Final.pdf
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    Description:
    MS Thesis
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    Type
    Thesis
    Authors
    Perna, Gabriela cc
    Advisors
    Voolstra, Christian R. cc
    Committee members
    Aranda, Manuel cc
    Tester, Mark A. cc
    Program
    Marine Science
    KAUST Department
    Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering (BESE) Division
    Date
    2019-04
    Embargo End Date
    2020-05-01
    Permanent link to this record
    http://hdl.handle.net/10754/644907
    
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    Access Restrictions
    At the time of archiving, the student author of this thesis opted to temporarily restrict access to it. The full text of this thesis became available to the public after the expiration of the embargo on 2020-05-01.
    Abstract
    Coral bleaching is now the main driver of reef degradation. The common notion is that most corals bleach and suffer mortality at just 1-2°C above their mean summer maximum temperatures, but some species and genotypes resist or recover better than others. Here we conducted a series of 18-hour short-term heat stress assays side-by-side with a long-term heat stress experiment to assess the ability of both approaches to resolve putative differences in coral thermotolerance and provide a measure of in situ reef temperature thresholds. Using a suite of measures (photosynthetic performance, coral whitening, chlorophyll a, host protein, algal symbiont counts, and algal type association), we assessed bleaching sensitivity/resilience of Stylophora pistillata colonies from the exposed and protected sides of a near-shore coral reef in the central Red Sea. As suggested by the differential mortality during a previous bleaching event, coral colonies from the protected site exhibited less impacted physiological performance in comparison to their exposed site counterparts, and these differences were resolved using both experimental setups. Notably, the long-term experiment provided better resolution with regard to the different measures collected, but at the price of portability, cost, and duration of the experiment. Variability in resilience to ocean warming is critical to reef persistence, yet we lack standardized diagnostics to rapidly assess bleaching severity or resilience across different corals and locations. Using a newly developed portable experimental system termed CBASS (the Coral Bleaching Automated Stress System), we demonstrate that mobile, short-term heat stress assays can resolve fine-scale differences in coral thermotolerance across reef sites. Based on our results, photosynthetic efficiency measured by non-invasive PAM fluorometry provides a rapid and representative proxy of coral resilience. Our system holds the potential to be employed for large-scale determination of in situ bleaching temperature thresholds across reef sites and species. Such data can then be used to identify resistant genotypes (and reefs) for downstream experimental examination and to complement existing remote-sensing approaches.
    Citation
    Perna, G. (2019). Standardized short-term bleaching assays resolve differences in coral thermotolerance across microhabitat reef sites. KAUST Research Repository. https://doi.org/10.25781/KAUST-98X34
    DOI
    10.25781/KAUST-98X34
    ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
    10.25781/KAUST-98X34
    Scopus Count
    Collections
    Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering (BESE) Division; Marine Science Program; MS Theses

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