Meeting Abstract
Many endangered boulder corals exhibit dramatically enhanced growth rates upon fragmentation into very small pieces, leading to the idea that fine fragmentation might be the optimal way to create captive coral stock for reef restoration. However, rapid growth could consume all energetic resources and leave the coral with no physiological capacity to meet natural environmental challenges, such as disease or thermal stress. Here, we evaluated the extent of this potential problem in two major reef-building coral species from the Florida Keys: Montastraea cavernosa and Orbicella faveolata. Five genotypes from each species were fragmented into progressively smaller pieces with surface areas ranging from 30 to ~3 cm2. Corals were maintained in common raceways for four months before final measurements and preservation for physiological analyses. As expected, smaller fragments grew significantly faster than larger fragments (P < 0.001). A significant interaction between initial size and species showed that smaller fragments experienced faster growth rates in O. faveolata than in M. cavernosa (P = 0.01). Protein quantification, immune enzymatic assays, and global gene expression analysis of corals from all sizes demonstrates whether physiological capacity to combat stress and disease becomes significantly compromised in rapidly growing fragments compared to slowly growing fragments. The results from this project directly inform coral reef restoration by providing guidelines for rapidly generating coral stock without compromising coral’s environmental robustness.
