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Coral reefs are astoundingly diverse ecosystems, built through intricate biotic and abiotic relationships. Yet climate change, pollution and over-harvesting are jeopardising not only the beauty and ecology of these systems, but also the food security, livelihoods and wave protection of hundreds of millions of people. This Focus brings together recent research and opinion published in Nature Research journals on the fundamentals of reef systems and how our activities are affecting them.
Sixteen-month manipulation experiments in a degraded macroalgae-dominated tropical reef setting show that lower coral species richness suppresses growth and survivorship of multiple species.
Large-scale phylogenetic analysis of coral reef fish species shows that functional traits evolve fastest in those at high and low trophic levels with narrow diet breadth.
What are the molecular mechanisms underpinning local adaptation? Reciprocal transplant of mustard hill coral from a variable to a more stable habitat demonstrates that populations exhibit phenotypic signatures consistent with local adaptation.
Larval dispersal of clownfish and butterflyfish across a 10,000 km2 area was tracked over 2 years, a large enough scale to inform the design of marine reserve networks and test their performance.
High-throughput metabarcoding of coral reef fish larvae from the Red Sea enables species-level reconstruction of the highly biodiverse larval community, and their spatio-temporal distribution and abundance.
The Great Barrier Reef has migrated rapidly in response to sea-level changes since the last glacial period, suggesting resilience to environmental stress over this interval, according to a reconstruction of reef accretion.
Deep reefs and their inhabitants are diverse, but environmental change, in particular warming, will cause these reefs found along southeastern Australia to tropicalize with different responses across functional groups, resulting in novel communities by the 2060s.
Productivity of coral reefs is enhanced near islands with no invasive rats, as populations of seabirds, which transfer nitrogen from deeper areas of ocean to the nearshore waters via their guano, are much larger than on rat-infested islands.
Coral-associated microbes could enhance the capacity of their host organism to respond to environmental change. Ziegler and colleagues use a reciprocal transplant experiment to show that microbiomes of heat-tolerant corals are more resilient to change than those of heat-sensitive corals.
Huanle Liu et al. report draft genomes of two Symbiodinium species, one from the most dominant type of symbionts in reef-building corals. They find evidence of positive selection in genes related to stress response, meiosis and other traits required for forming successful symbiotic relationships.
Michael Ochsenkühn et al. look at the microbial and metabolic composition of coral surfaces and the surrounding seawater. They find that the metabolites found on the surface of the coral create a concentration gradient that influences the surrounding microbiome.