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Description:
Project Manager:
Ian Enochs
Project Years:
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
Project Summary:
Coral cover has declined precipitously throughout the Caribbean due to numerous global, regional, and localized factors, ranging from warming and acidification, to disease and land-based sources of pollution. In addition to passive characterization of failing ecosystem health, active management approaches are now being adopted to arrest degradation and restore healthy reef ecosystems. One such restoration approach involves the culturing of genetically diverse coral populations and outplanting fragments to degraded reefs in order to enhance wild stocks, create habitat, and enhance the potential for ecologically meaningful sexual reproduction. While this practice is well suited for responding to mortality associated with infrequent acute stress events, such as storm damage and boat groundings, concerns remain as to whether restored populations live and thrive for years to decades after restoration. This is especially problematic where chronic unmitigated stressors remain. If environmental conditions initially led to mortality, will restored populations fare better Both experimental and field-based research into the influence of environmental conditions on coral physiology have provided numerous insights into potential mechanisms of resilience. Provided that these mechanisms are tested, developed, and operationalized in a measured and effective manner, the potential exists that they can be applied to cultured corals to increase their longevity in the field, ultimately leading to more effective restoration practices. Accordingly, we propose two areas of focus that will "support research and development of innovative resilience interventions (e.g., stress hardening corals, assisted migration and gene flow, manipulation of symbiotic partnership) to conduct low-risk projects." First, we will explore the potential for environmental variability to confer lasting down-stream resilience to treated coral fragments. We will leverage the state-of-the-art Experimental Reef Lab (ERL) to stress-harden corals to temperature and ocean acidification stress. It has been found that corals that inhabit more variable temperature regimes are more heat tolerant and that some degree of this thermal tolerance can be attributed to acclimatization (e.g. Palumbi et al. 2014). Further, it has been observed that more dynamic carbonate chemistry regimes can lead to enhanced calcification (e.g., Enochs et al. 2018). Thus, we will work to stress-harden corals based on the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences review of novel coral intervention strategies. Second, we will investigate the potential for enhanced heterotrophy to increase lipid stores and lead to greater resilience. Fed versus starved corals have been shown to have been shown to be more resistant to bleaching (Grottoli et al. 2006) and acidification stress (Towle et al. 2015), and it is likely that this is related to lipid content. Several critical research gaps remain. It is not presently known to what extent this mechanism can be used to increase resilience, how long the benefits will last, and to what degree lipid content is plastic vs. genetically hardwired. Objectives: Following NAS recommendations, we will work to: 1. Increase the capacity of outplanted corals to withstand environmental stressors 2. Develop cost-effective and scalable tools for stress hardening laboratory raised corals Affiliated Projects: We will leverage ongoing projects in the Port of Miami (CRCP Priority Watershed), where corals experience highly variable stress conditions, to evaluate if this type of environment can confer special ecological/restoration value to the colonies residing there. An OAR Omics funded project to investigate molecular mechanisms behind AOML's CRCP Restoration work will be used to do transcriptomic workups on successful stress-hardening techniques. Finally, this project will leverage technologies developed and applied in the CRCP restoration project targeted at quantitatively assessing coral genotype performance (ID# 31254). Project Partners: We will utilize ongoing collaborations with the University of Miami coral nursery as well as Mote Marine Lab to test these methodologies on coral genotypes presently used for restoration and outplanting.
Expected Outcome:
This project will result in the evaluation of techniques to stress-harden corals and increase resistance to conditions that would otherwise cause mortality. Directly, experiments will be run to stress-harden coral genotypes and resilience will be assessed compared with untreated corals. Successful techniques will be experimentally investigated further to determine the duration of the conferred benefit, the mechanism by which the benefit operates, and the viability of the methodology for restoration. Practical and effective methodologies will be applied in real-world restoration efforts and shared publicly with existing nursery operations. Methodologies, resulting data, and conclusions will be published in peer-reviewed publications and presented at international scientific meetings.
Project Locations:
Project Category:
Restoration
Project Status:
Funding Ended
Associated Products:
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