Apparent recruitment failure for the vast majority of coral species at Eilat, Red Sea
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Apparent recruitment failure for the vast majority of coral species at Eilat, Red Sea Gabriele Guerrini1,2 Baruch Rinkevich1
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Maayan Yerushalmy1,4 • Dor Shefy1,2,3 • Nadav Shashar2
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Received: 22 February 2020 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The status of coral reefs is often portrayed by parameters (e.g., coverage, bleaching, diseases, nutrients and rugosity) assigned to adult populations. Yet, coral recruitment is essential for sustaining coral populations, especially in the aftermath of major disturbances. Studying earliest coral recruitment at species level can reveal declines in the recovery potential and resilience of coral populations and communities, even if adult abundance and coral cover is sustained. Rates of coral recruitment were
quantified once a month for 4 yrs from tiles and stones (Eilat, Red Sea), revealing a dramatic discrepancy in coral species recruited (n = 15) compared to adult-species currently on site (n = 55), with 1–2 dominant species accounting for C 80% of recruits. The low rates and limited diversity of settling corals recorded in this study appear unlikely to sustain contemporary coral assemblages, so unless there are marked changes in the settlement dynamics, we would expect to see inevitable declines in the abundance and diversity of reef corals at these locations.
Topic Editor Morgan S. Pratchett
Keywords Biodiversity Coral Degradation Recruitment Red Sea Resilience
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-020-01998-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Baruch Rinkevich [email protected] Gabriele Guerrini [email protected]
4
Department of Marine Biology, University of Haifa Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences, University of Haifa, 31905 Haifa, Israel
Maayan Yerushalmy [email protected] Dor Shefy [email protected] Nadav Shashar [email protected] 1
Israel Oceanography and Limnological Research, National Institute of Oceanography, P.O. Box 8030, 31080 Tel-Shikmona, Haifa, Israel
2
Marine Biology and Biotechnology Program, Department of Life Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Eilat Campus, 84105 Beer-Sheva, Israel
3
The Interuniversity Institute for Marine Science, 88000 Eilat, Israel
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Coral Reefs
Introduction Coral reefs, a major source of ecosystem services, are declining at accelerating rates worldwide due to a range of anthropogenic and natural stresses, on local and global scales (Hughes et al. 2018; Bindoff et al. 2019), leading to shifts in the composition and structure of the remaining coral assemblage (Kubicek et al. 2019; Sully et al. 2019). Furthermore, long-lasting and gradually developing changes may occur unnoticed (Hughes et al. 2013; Shlesinger and Loya 2019), shifting coral communities (Pratchett et al. 2017) to less desirable assemblages and reefs into algaldominated states (Scheffer et al. 2001; Hughes et al. 2013), instigating a loss o
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