Resilience of Octocoral Forests to Catastrophic Storms
Resilience of Octocoral Forests to Catastrophic Storms
复制标题
DOI：
10.1038/s41598-020-61238-1
复制
发表时间：
2020-03-09
影响因子：
4.6
通讯作者：
Edmunds, P. J.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Lasker, H. R.;Martinez-Quintana, A.;Edmunds, P. J.
经过几个世纪的人为干扰，加勒比海珊瑚礁群落与20世纪50年代描述的有很大不同。许多珊瑚礁在功能上由大型藻类主导，但这种群落状态只是当今珊瑚礁可能过渡的几种可能性之一。在加勒比海的珊瑚礁上，珊瑚一直很丰富，但在过去几十年中，它们的丰度增加表明，树栖珊瑚有可能在迄今为止一直由石珊瑚主导的珊瑚礁上扩大它们的种群。在这里，我们展示了美属维尔京群岛圣约翰边缘珊瑚礁上三个地点的珊瑚虫占主导地位的社区对2017年两次5级飓风的影响具有弹性。我们描述了五年多来在三个地点的浅礁（类似于9米深）的珊瑚群落的动态，并测试飓风厄玛和玛丽亚的影响。飓风降低了青少年和成年珊瑚群落的密度高达47%。然而，只有微弱的影响，物种丰富度和相对丰度的珊瑚物种。飓风并没有改变风暴前各地点间存在的珊瑚群落结构的空间变异模式。珊瑚补充体密度（个体
After centuries of human-mediated disturbances, Caribbean reef communities are vastly different from those described in the 1950s. Many are functionally dominated by macroalgae, but this community state represents only one of several possibilities into which present-day coral reefs can transition. Octocorals have always been abundant on Caribbean reefs, but increases in their abundance over the last few decades suggest that arborescent octocorals have the potential to expand their populations on reefs that hitherto had been dominated by scleractinians. Here we show that octocoral-dominated communities at three sites on the fringing reefs of St. John, US Virgin Islands, were resilient to the effects of two Category 5 hurricanes in 2017. We describe the dynamics of octocoral communities over five years at three sites on shallow reefs (similar to 9-m depth), and test for the effects of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. The hurricanes depressed the densities of juvenile and adult octocoral colonies as much as 47%. However, there were only weak effects on species richness and the relative abundances of the octocoral species. The hurricanes did not alter patterns of spatial variability in octocoral community structure that existed among sites prior to the storms. The density of octocoral recruits (individuals