Seawater carbonate chemistry and combined responses of primary coral polyps and their algal endosymbionts to decreasing seawater pH

DOI

With coral reefs declining globally, resilience of these ecosystems hinges on successful coral recruitment. However, knowledge of the acclimatory and/or adaptive potential in response to environmental challenges such as ocean acidification (OA) in earliest life stages is limited. Our combination of physiological measurements, microscopy, computed tomography techniques and gene expression analysis allowed us to thoroughly elucidate the mechanisms underlying the response of early-life stages of corals, together with their algal partners, to the projected decline in oceanic pH. We observed extensive physiological, morphological and transcriptional changes in surviving recruits, and the transition to a less-skeleton/more-tissue phenotype. We found that decreased pH conditions stimulate photosynthesis and endosymbiont growth, and gene expression potentially linked to photosynthates translocation. Our unique holistic study discloses the previously unseen intricate net of interacting mechanisms that regulate the performance of these organisms in response to OA.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2021) 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 by seacarb is 2021-11-22.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.938670
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0328
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.66t1g1k27
Related Identifier https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/seacarb/index.html
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.938670
Provenance
Creator Scucchia, Federica ORCID logo; Malik, Assaf ORCID logo; Zaslansky, P ORCID logo; Putnam, H M ORCID logo; Mass, Tali
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2021
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 14517 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (34.916 LON, 29.502 LAT)
Temporal Coverage Begin 2020-02-01T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2020-02-29T00:00:00Z