Different resiliencies in coral communities over ecological and geological time scales in American Samoa
Type
ArticleKAUST Department
Red Sea Research Center (RSRC)Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering (BESE) Division
Date
2021-09-02Submitted Date
2020-11-06Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/670971
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In 1917, Alfred Mayor surveyed a 270 m transect on a reef flat on American Samoa. Eleven surveys were conducted on the transect from 1917 to 2019. The coral community on the reef crest was resilient over the century, occasionally being seriously damaged but always recovering rapidly. In contrast, the originally most dense coral community on the reef flat has been steadily deteriorating throughout the century. Resilience of coral communities in regions of high wave energy on the reef crests was associated with the important binding function of the crustose coralline alga (CCA) Porolithon onkodes. Successful coral recruits were found on CCA 94% of the time, yet living coral cover correlated negatively with CCA cover as they became alternative winners in competition. Mayor drilled a core from the transect on the surface to the basalt base of the reef 48 m below. Communities on Aua reef were dominated by scleractinians through the Holocene, while cores on another transect 2 km away showed the reef was occupied by alcyonaceans of the genus Sinularia, which built the massive reef with spiculite to the basalt base 37 m below. Despite periods of sea levels rising 9 to 15 times the rate of reef accretion, the reefs never drowned. The consistency of scleractinians on Aua reef and Sinularia on Utulei Reef 2 km away during the Holocene was because the shape of the bay allowed more water motion on Aua reef. After 10700 yr of reef building by octocorals, coastal construction terminated this spiculite-reef development.Citation
Birkeland, C., Green, A., Lawrence, A., Coward, G., Vaeoso, M., & Fenner, D. (2021). Different resiliencies in coral communities over ecological and geological time scales in American Samoa. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 673, 55–68. doi:10.3354/meps13792Sponsors
We thank the Government of American Samoa, its Coral Reef Advisory Group, and its Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources for inviting us to conduct the surveys over the past 25 years and handling our logistics. We are grateful to the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, DC, for allowing us to use Alfred Mayor’s illustrations. We thank Mark Nakamura for rawing our diagrams and Cheryl Squair for advising us on CCA. Shreya Yadav and Eric Birkeland provided instruction or assistance with data management. We are very appreciative of the interest and concern of the people of Aua Village for their reef and for their hospitality in letting us resurvey the transect 10 times over the past 47 years.Publisher
Inter-Research Science CenterJournal
Marine Ecology Progress SeriesAdditional Links
https://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v673/p55-68/https://www.int-res.com/articles/meps_oa/m673p055.pdf
ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.3354/meps13792
Scopus Count
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Archived with thanks to Inter-Research Science Center under a Creative Commons license, details at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0//