Seawater carbonate chemistry and calcification of two mediterranean cold-water coral species in a laboratory experiment

DOI

Deep-water ecosystems are characterized by relatively low carbonate concentration values and, due to ocean acidification (OA), these habitats might be among the first to be exposed to undersaturated conditions in the forthcoming years. However, until now, very few studies have been conducted to test how cold-water coral (CWC) species react to such changes in the seawater chemistry. The present work aims to investigate the mid-term effect of decreased pH on calcification of the two branching CWC species most widely distributed in the Mediterranean, Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata. No significant effects were observed in the skeletal growth rate, microdensity and porosity of both species after 6 months of exposure. However, while the calcification rate of M. oculata was similar for all colony fragments, a heterogeneous skeletal growth pattern was observed in L. pertusa, the younger nubbins showing higher growth rates than the older ones. A higher energy demand is expected in these young, fast-growing fragments and, therefore, a reduction in calcification might be noticed earlier during long-term exposure to acidified conditions.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Lavigne et al, 2014) 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 2014-06-05.

Supplement to: Movilla, Juancho; Gori, Andrea; Calvo, Eva; Orejas, Covadonga; Lopez-Sanz, Angel; Domínguez-Carrió, Carlos; Grinyó, Jordi; Pelejero, Carles (2014): Resistance of Two Mediterranean Cold-Water Coral Species to Low-pH Conditions. Water, 6(1), 59-67

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.833187
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.3390/w6010059
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.833187
Provenance
Creator Movilla, Juancho ORCID logo; Gori, Andrea ORCID logo; Calvo, Eva ORCID logo; Orejas, Covadonga ORCID logo; Lopez-Sanz, Angel; Domínguez-Carrió, Carlos; Grinyó, Jordi; Pelejero, Carles ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2014
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 8700 data points
Discipline Earth System Research