Abstract
Coral recruitment represents a key element for coral reef persistence and resilience in the face of environmental disturbances. Studying coral recruitment patterns is fundamental for assessing reef health and implementing appropriate management strategies in an era of climate change. The FluorIS system has been developed to acquire high resolution, wide field-of-view (FOV) in situ images of coral recruits fluorescence and has proven successful in shallow reef environments. However, up to now, its applicability to mesophotic coral ecosystems remains unknown due to the complexity of the system and the limited time available when working at mesophotic depth. In this study we optimized the FluorIS system by utilizing a single infrared-converted camera instead of the bulkier regular dual-camera system, substantially reducing the system complexity and significantly decreasing the acquisition time to an average of 10 s for a set of 3 images. Moreover, the speed-FluorIS system is much more economical, decreasing the cost of the full set-up by roughly 40% compared to the original dual-camera system. We tested the utility of the speed-FluorIS by surveying coral recruits across shallow and mesophotic reefs of the Red Sea (Gulf of Eilat) and Bermuda, two of the most northerly reefs in the world with markedly different substrate and topography, and demonstrate that the modified system enables fast imaging of fluorescence to study coral recruitment patterns over a broader range of depths and reef topographies than previous fluorescence methods. Our single-camera system represents a valuable, non-invasive and rapid underwater tool which will help standardize surveys and long-term monitoring of coral recruits, contributing to our understanding of these vital and delicate early life stages of corals.
Highlights
IntroductionOver the last three decades, coral reef ecosystems have been suffering massive declines due to both local (e.g., pollution, nutrient enrichment, overfishing, and sedimentation) and global stressors (global warming, ocean acidification, and sea level rise) (Dustan and Halas, 1987; Hoegh-Guldberg and Bruno, 2010; D’Angelo and Wiedenmann, 2014)
Over the last three decades, coral reef ecosystems have been suffering massive declines due to both local and global stressors (Dustan and Halas, 1987; Hoegh-Guldberg and Bruno, 2010; D’Angelo and Wiedenmann, 2014)
The sensor sensitivity was set to a final value of ISO320, so to summarize, the ultimate exposure parameters were set to 1/250th, f10, ISO320
Summary
Over the last three decades, coral reef ecosystems have been suffering massive declines due to both local (e.g., pollution, nutrient enrichment, overfishing, and sedimentation) and global stressors (global warming, ocean acidification, and sea level rise) (Dustan and Halas, 1987; Hoegh-Guldberg and Bruno, 2010; D’Angelo and Wiedenmann, 2014). The FluorIS system was developed to acquire high resolution, wide field-of-view (FOV) in situ images of coral recruits fluorescence during daytime (Zweifler et al, 2017), enabling simultaneous imaging of GFP and chlorophyll-a with a single excitation source. Such a system has been shown to be successful in shallow reef environments (Zweifler et al, 2017), its application to mesophotic ecosystems is highly challenging, due to the time limits and technical constraints imposed by nonrecreational deep diving
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