Abstract
Coral reefs worldwide are in a state of decline, but the population status and impacts of stressors for rare species are generally not well documented using broad-scale monitoring protocols. We fate-tracked all known colonies of the pillar coral, Dendrogyra cylindrus, on the Florida Reef Tract (FRT) from 2013 to 2020 to assess population condition and trend, and to document the relative impacts of chronic and acute stressors. Large average colony size, an absence of juveniles, and large geographic distances between genotypes suggest that the Florida D. cylindrus population has been reproductively extinct for decades. During the study period, low-intensity chronic stressors were balanced by regrowth, while back-to-back years of coral bleaching and thermally-exacerbated disease led to declines that the subsequent recovery rates suggest would require 11 uninterrupted years to overcome. The most recent stressor on Florida’s D. cylindrus population is “stony coral tissue loss disease” (SCTLD). Following the appearance of the disease in Florida in 2014, unrecoverable losses occurred within the D. cylindrus population as tissue, colonies, and whole genotypes suffered complete mortality. Losses of 94% of coral tissue, 93% of colonies, and 86% of genotypes between 2014 and the end of 2020 have led to functional extinction of D. cylindrus on the FRT.
Highlights
The pillar coral Dendrogyra cylindrus is a conspicuous stony coral described as uncommon or rare in reef environments throughout the Caribbean (Szmant, 1986)
Most small colonies were very near larger colonies and had the appearance of fragmented pillars. This project documented only one small colony (
Making the liberal assumptions that the same growth rate exists in the development of the base in vertical and horizontal directions and that the rate is constant from settlement onward, only 11 of the Florida Reef Tract (FRT) genotypes (6%) could potentially be younger than 20 years
Summary
The pillar coral Dendrogyra cylindrus is a conspicuous stony coral described as uncommon or rare in reef environments throughout the Caribbean (Szmant, 1986). Declines in coral cover over decadal scales on this Florida barrier reef system are well documented (Porter and Meier, 1992; Ruzicka et al, 2013) Many of these losses are the result of short-term stressors such as bleaching or disease events causing the demise of long-lived colonies. Decades of these acute stressors on the FRT include historic bleaching events (Causey, 2008), outbreaks of white band disease in Acroporids (Aronson and Precht, 2001), and outbreaks of white plague, black band, and yellow-band diseases on a wide range of species (Goreau et al, 1998; Richardson et al, 1998; Sutherland et al, 2004). Beginning in 2014, a series of high-intensity stressors included two consecutive hyperthermal bleaching events (summer 2014 and summer 2015) and the outbreak of a temporally and geographically extensive disease termed “stony coral tissue loss disease” (SCTLD) (Precht et al, 2016; Florida Coral Disease Response Research and Epidemiology Team, 2018)
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