Physiological acclimation to elevated temperature in a reef-building coral from an upwelling environment
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Physiological acclimation to elevated temperature in a reef-building coral from an upwelling environment A. B. Mayfield • T.-Y. Fan • C.-S. Chen
Received: 4 April 2013 / Accepted: 18 July 2013 / Published online: 9 August 2013 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Abstract Recent work has found that pocilloporid corals from regions characterized by unstable temperatures, such as those exposed to periodic upwelling, display a remarkable degree of phenotypic plasticity. In order to understand whether important reef builders from these upwelling reefs remain physiologically uncompromised at temperatures they will experience in the coming decades as a result of global climate change, a long-term elevated temperature experiment was conducted with Pocillopora damicornis specimens collected from Houbihu, a small embayment within Nanwan Bay, southern Taiwan that is characterized by 8–9 °C temperature changes during upwelling events. Upon nine months of exposure to nearly 30 °C, all colony
Communicated by Biology Editor Dr. Anastazia Banaszak
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00338-013-1067-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. A. B. Mayfield (&) T.-Y. Fan C.-S. Chen National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium, 2 Houwan Rd., Checheng, Pingtung 944, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] A. B. Mayfield Living Oceans Foundation, Landover, MD, USA T.-Y. Fan Graduate Institute of Marine Biodiversity and Evolution, National Dong-Hwa University, Checheng, Taiwan C.-S. Chen Graduate Institute of Marine Biotechnology, National Dong-Hwa University, Checheng, Taiwan C.-S. Chen Department of Marine Biotechnology and Resources, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
(mortality and surface area), polyp (Symbiodinium density and chlorophyll a content), tissue (total thickness), and molecular (gene expression and molecular composition)level parameters were documented at similar levels between experimental corals and controls incubated at 26.5 °C, suggesting that this species can readily acclimate to elevated temperatures that cause significant degrees of stress, or even bleaching and mortality, in conspecifics of other regions of the Indo-Pacific. However, the gastrodermal tissue layer was relatively thicker in corals of the high temperature treatment sampled after nine months, possibly as an adaptive response to shade Symbiodinium from the higher photosynthetically active radiation levels that they were experiencing at that sampling time. Such shading may have prevented high light and high temperature-induced photoinhibition, and consequent bleaching, in these samples. Keywords Acclimation Coral reefs Endosymbiosis Gene expression Thermal stress Upwelling
Introduction Scleractinian corals and the reefs they construct are potentially threatened by rising global temperatures and pCO2 (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2007) due to the fact that coral–dinoflagellate (genus Symbiodinium) endosymbioses have typically
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