Bleaching, coral mortality and subsequent survivorship on a West Australian fringing reef
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Bleaching, coral mortality and subsequent survivorship on a West Australian fringing reef M. Depczynski • J. P. Gilmour • T. Ridgway • H. Barnes • A. J. Heyward T. H. Holmes • J. A. Y. Moore • B. T. Radford • D. P. Thomson • P. Tinkler • S. K. Wilson
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Received: 2 May 2012 / Accepted: 5 October 2012 / Published online: 21 October 2012 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
Abstract The spring and summer of 2010/11 saw an exceptionally strong La Nin˜a push warm waters from Indonesia down the Western Australian coastline, resulting in a host of extraordinary biological oddities including significant bleaching of Western Australian corals. Here, we report a 79–92 % decline in coral cover for a location in the Ningaloo Marine Park where sustained high water temperatures over an 8-month period left just 1–6 % of corals alive. The severity of bleaching provided an opportunity to investigate the resilience of different taxonomic groups and colony size classes to an acute but protracted episode of thermal stress. While the sub-dominant community of massive growth forms fared reasonably well, the dominant Acropora and Montipora assemblages
Communicated by Ecology Editor Prof. Mark Hay
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00338-012-0974-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. M. Depczynski (&) J. P. Gilmour T. Ridgway A. J. Heyward B. T. Radford P. Tinkler Australian Institute of Marine Science, The UWA Oceans Institute, Crawley, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] H. Barnes Department of Environment and Conservation, Exmouth Regional Office, Kensington, WA, Australia T. H. Holmes J. A. Y. Moore S. K. Wilson Marine Science Program, Department of Environment and Conservation, Kensington, WA, Australia D. P. Thomson CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Wembly, WA, Australia
all died, with the exception of the\10 cm size class, which seemed immune to bleaching. Keywords Coral bleaching Coral reef disturbance Western Australia Ningaloo Reef Bundegi Size-class susceptibility
Introduction There has been an unprecedented worldwide decline in coral cover and change in coral community composition over the past three decades (Pandolfi et al. 2003), which has been directly linked to climate change. The damaging effects of climate change are now widely regarded as one of the most serious long-term threats to the sustainability of coral reefs (Hughes et al. 2003). Increasing sea temperatures have been directly linked to the occurrence of coral bleaching (Hoegh-Guldberg 1999), and extreme thermal events and mass coral bleaching have resulted in significant mortality and dramatic shifts in coral community structure (e.g. Goreau et al. 2000; Smith et al. 2008; van Woesik et al. 2011). In Australia, coral bleaching from elevated thermal stress has been well reported along the length of the east coast (Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report 2009). However, unlike the east coast, similar records for the Western Austral
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