An Indo-Pacific coral spawning database.

The discovery of multi-species synchronous spawning of scleractinian corals on the Great Barrier Reef in the 1980s stimulated an extraordinary effort to document spawning times in other parts of the globe. Unfortunately, most of these data remain unpublished which limits our understanding of regional and global reproductive patterns. The Coral Spawning Database (CSD) collates much of these disparate data into a single place.

Positive genetic associations among fitness traits support evolvability of a reef-building coral under multiple stressors.

Climate change threatens organisms in a variety of interactive ways that requires simultaneous adaptation of multiple traits. Predicting evolutionary responses requires an understanding of the potential for interactions among stressors and the genetic variance and covariance among fitness-related traits that may reinforce or constrain an adaptive response. Here we investigate the capacity of Acropora millepora, a reef-building coral, to adapt to multiple environmental stressors: rising sea surface temperature, ocean acidification, and increased prevalence of infectious diseases.

Disentangling causation: complex roles of coral-associated microorganisms in disease.

Rapidly changing climate regimes combined with other anthropogenic pressures are implicated in increased disease epizootics among reef building corals, resulting in changing habitat structure. These accumulated stressors directly contribute to disease outbreaks by compromising the coral host immune system, modulating virulence of microbial pathogens and/or disrupting the balance within the microbiome of the holobiont. Disentangling coral disease causation has been challenging, and while progress has been made for certain diseases in terms of the roles the associated microorganisms play, it is evident that like in other marine or terrestrial systems, compromised host health cannot always be attributed to a single causative agent.