Disturbance and the Reorganization of Caribbean Reef Communities: Unique Event or Repeated Pattern?

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9902192AronsonThe staghorn coral Acropora cervicornis was a dominant space-occupier and an important framework constructor of Caribbean coral reefs during the Pleistocene and Holocene. Populations of Acropora have been killed throughout the region over the past two decades by outbreaks of white-band disease, a presumed bacterial infection. On lagoonal reefs in Belize, the demise of Acropora led to dominance by the lettuce coral Agaricia tenuifolia. This Acropora-to-Agaricia transition produced a clear signature in the subsurface sediments in Belize, and analysis of cores extracted from these reefs showed this sequence of events to be unique in at least the last 3,000 years. Similar Agaricia-dominated communities are common today in the Laguna de Chiriqui in northwestern Panama, more than 1,000 km from the Belizean reefs. Were these reefs also previously dominated by Acropora? An intensive program of coring will reveal whether the Panamanian reefs have a similar Recent history to those in Belize. More important, the cores will be used to determine if the mass mortality of Acropora was unique to the Recent, as in Belize, or whether similar events occurred in the past. If the loss of Acropora to disease is a new phenomenon, it could be related to accelerating human activity in the Caribbean.