Combined ocean acidification and low temperature stressors cause coral mortality

DOI

Oceans are predicted to become more acidic and experience more temperature variability-both hot and cold-as climate changes. Ocean acidification negatively impacts reef-building corals, especially when interacting with other stressors such as elevated temperature. However, the effects of combined acidification and low temperature stress have yet to be assessed. Here, we exposed nubbins of the scleractinian coral Montipora digitata to ecologically relevant acidic, cold, or combined stress for 2 weeks. Coral nubbins exhibited 100% survival in isolated acidic and cold treatments, but 30% mortality under combined conditions. These results provide further evidence that coupled stressors have an interactive effect on coral physiology, and reveal that corals in colder environments are also susceptible to the deleterious impacts of coupled ocean acidification and thermal stress.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2016) was used to compute a complete and consistent set of carbonate system variables, as described by Nisumaa et al. (2010). In this dataset the original values were archived in addition with the recalculated parameters (see related PI). The date of carbonate chemistry calculation is 2016-11-29.

Supplement to: Kavousi, Javid; Parkinson, John Everett; Nakamura, Takashi (2016): Combined ocean acidification and low temperature stressors cause coral mortality. Coral Reefs, 35(3), 903-907

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.868905
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-016-1459-3
Related Identifier https://cran.r-project.org/package=seacarb
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.868905
Provenance
Creator Kavousi, Javid; Parkinson, John Everett ORCID logo; Nakamura, Takashi ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2016
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Supplementary Dataset; Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 3000 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (127.879 LON, 26.709 LAT)
Temporal Coverage Begin 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2015-01-31T00:00:00Z