Abstract
Symbiodiniaceae communities in some corals often shuffle or switch after severe bleaching events, one of the major threats to coral survival in a world with climate change. In this study we reciprocally transplanted five Leptoria phrygia colonies between two sites with significantly different temperature regimes and monitored them for 12 months. Our ITS2 amplicon deep sequencing demonstrated that L. phrygia acclimatized to maintain a strong and stable association with Durusdinium D17, D. trenchii, and D. glynnii, but also remained flexible and formed a short-term association with different Cladocopium. Most interestingly, two colonies shuffled between Durusdinium and Cladocopium without the occurrence of bleaching; one colony even switched its dominant Cladocopium after generic shuffling. Both dominant Cladocopium were originally rare with relative abundances as low as 0.024%. This is the first record of adult corals switching dominant symbiont without bleaching.
Highlights
Symbiodiniaceae communities in some corals often shuffle or switch after severe bleaching events, one of the major threats to coral survival in a world with climate change
Our study demonstrated that internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) sequences in L. phrygia comprise few Durusdinium and numerous background Cladocopium
Our results concur with those of Carballo-Bolaños et al.[41] in that colonies able to adjust their relative abundances of Durusdinium and Cladocopium mostly retained the same dominant symbiont through time; there were two exceptions: (1) native WLT colony III and transplanted third nuclear power plant (OL) colony V both shuffled from Durusdinium- to Cladocopium-dominated in November 2015 and March 2016, when the sea surface temperatures (SSTs) decreased (Fig. 1), and (2) native WLT colony III shuffled to become Durusdinium-dominant again when the SST increased again in August 2016 (Fig. 1)
Summary
Symbiodiniaceae communities in some corals often shuffle or switch after severe bleaching events, one of the major threats to coral survival in a world with climate change. Two colonies shuffled between Durusdinium and Cladocopium without the occurrence of bleaching; one colony even switched its dominant Cladocopium after generic shuffling Both dominant Cladocopium were originally rare with relative abundances as low as 0.024%. Most studies have identified the dominant and codominant algal species in corals using conventional Sanger sequencing, restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), or temperature gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE). These methods have limited resolution and very often fail to detect background species that might be ecologically important but extremely low in quantity (e.g.,
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