Seawater carbonate chemistry and coral micro‑ and macro‑morphological skeletal properties

DOI

This study investigates the effects of long-term exposure to OA on skeletal parameters of four tropical zooxanthellate corals naturally living at CO2 seeps and adjacent control sites from two locations (Dobu and Upa Upasina) in the Papua New Guinea underwater volcanic vent system. The seeps are characterized by seawater pH values ranging from 8.0 to about 7.7. The skeletal porosity of Galaxea fascicularis, Acropora millepora, massive Porites, and Pocillopora damicornis was higher (up to ~ 40%, depending on the species) at the seep sites compared to the control sites. Pocillopora damicornis also showed a decrease of micro-density (up to 7%). Thus, further investigations conducted on this species showed an increase of the volume fraction of the larger pores (up to 7%), a decrease of the intraskeletal organic matrix content (up to 15%), and an increase of the intraskeletal water content (up to 59%) at the seep sites. The organic matrix related strain and crystallite size did not vary between seep and control sites. This multi-species study showed a common phenotypic response among different zooxanthellate corals subjected to the same environmental pressures, leading to the development of a more porous skeletal phenotype under 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 2022-04-06.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.943053
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-98976-9
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.943053
Provenance
Creator Prada, Fiorella ORCID logo; Brizi, Leonardo ORCID logo; Franzellitti, Silvia ORCID logo; Mengoli, Stefano; Fermani, Simona; Polishchuk, Iryna; Baraldi, Nicola; Ricci, Francesco ORCID logo; Palazzo, Quinzia; Caroselli, Erik ORCID logo; Pokroy, Boaz; Giorgini, Loris; Dubinsky, Zvy; Fantazzini, Paola (ORCID: 0000-0002-4203-540X); Falini, Giuseppe; Goffredo, Stefano ORCID logo; Fabricius, Katharina Elisabeth ORCID logo
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 772 data points
Discipline Earth System Research