Changing disturbance regimes, material legacies, and stabilizing feedbacks: Dead coral skeletons impair key recovery processes following coral bleaching.

Ecosystem responses to disturbance depend on the nature of the perturbation and the ecological legacies left behind, making it critical to understand how climate-driven changes in disturbance regimes modify resilience properties of ecosystems. For coral reefs, recent increases in severe marine heat waves now co-occur with powerful storms, the historic agent of disturbance. While storms kill coral and remove their skeletons, heat waves bleach and kill corals but leave their skeletons intact.