A Multidisciplinary Approach to Species Boundaries in Tropical Reef Corals

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Tropical hard corals are represented by thousands of species. Corals are the building blocks of a tropical marine ecosystem that rivals rainforests in productivity, diversity, and biological complexity. Despite fundamental ecological and economic roles that hard corals play in marine ecosystems, the process of diversification and speciation are poorly understood. To understand how isolating barriers evolve between new coral species, this research will combine data from morphology, paleontology, DNA sequence data, and field experiments to assess the permeability of species boundaries to gene flow. Research on this tropical coral system will answer two fundamental questions in evolutionary biology: 1) how do ecological processes affect the rate of speciation, and 2) how are species boundaries maintained in the face of gene flow? This research provides training opportunities for under-represented and non-traditional students from the state of Hawaii, Central Pacific Islands, and the Republic of Panama. Coral reefs are in global decline due to climate change, over-fishing, and increasing urban development. Data and findings from this proposal will aid in understanding the origin and maintance of species diversity in extremely rich, but increasingly threatened, tropical marine ecosystems.