TY - JOUR
T1 - Empty Niches after Extinctions Increase Population Sizes of Modern Corals
AU - Prada, Carlos
AU - Hanna, Bishoy
AU - Budd, Ann F.
AU - Woodley, Cheryl M.
AU - Schmutz, Jeremy
AU - Grimwood, Jane
AU - Iglesias-Prieto, Roberto
AU - Pandolfi, John M.
AU - Levitan, Don
AU - Johnson, Kenneth G.
AU - Knowlton, Nancy
AU - Kitano, Hiroaki
AU - DeGiorgio, Michael
AU - Medina, Mónica
N1 - Funding Information:
Our project was supported with startup funds by The Department of Biology at The Pennsylvania State University , NSF grants: OCE 1442206 and IOS 0644438 , NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program ( CRCP 30022 , CDHC 1133 ), Hudson Alpha , The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute , and The Cannon Foundation . C.P. has been supported by the Earl S. Tupper Fellowship from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. We thank the governments of Panama, Mexico, and the USA for granting permits for coral collections. We thank Michele Weber, Mary Alice Coffroth, Anastasia Banaszak, and Shinichi Sunagawa for field assistance. We thank Tom Capo and Phil Gillette for keeping coral genome colony stocks at coral hatchery at the University of Miami. The CyberSTAR cluster at Pennsylvania State University provided computing resources. All our procedures are in agreement with the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) of The Pennsylvania State University.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2016/12/5
Y1 - 2016/12/5
N2 - Large environmental fluctuations often cause mass extinctions, extirpating species and transforming communities [1, 2]. While the effects on community structure are evident in the fossil record, demographic consequences for populations of individual species are harder to evaluate because fossils reveal relative, but not absolute, abundances. However, genomic analyses of living species that have survived a mass extinction event offer the potential for understanding the demographic effects of such environmental fluctuations on extant species. Here, we show how environmental variation since the Pliocene has shaped demographic changes in extant corals of the genus Orbicella, major extant reef builders in the Caribbean that today are endangered. We use genomic approaches to estimate previously unknown current and past population sizes over the last 3 million years. Populations of all three Orbicella declined around 2–1 million years ago, coincident with the extinction of at least 50% of Caribbean coral species. The estimated changes in population size are consistent across the three species despite their ecological differences. Subsequently, two shallow-water specialists expanded their population sizes at least 2-fold, over a time that overlaps with the disappearance of their sister competitor species O. nancyi (the organ-pipe Orbicella). Our study suggests that populations of Orbicella species are capable of rebounding from reductions in population size under suitable conditions and that the effective population size of modern corals provides rich standing genetic variation for corals to adapt to climate change. For conservation genetics, our study suggests the need to evaluate genetic variation under appropriate demographic models.
AB - Large environmental fluctuations often cause mass extinctions, extirpating species and transforming communities [1, 2]. While the effects on community structure are evident in the fossil record, demographic consequences for populations of individual species are harder to evaluate because fossils reveal relative, but not absolute, abundances. However, genomic analyses of living species that have survived a mass extinction event offer the potential for understanding the demographic effects of such environmental fluctuations on extant species. Here, we show how environmental variation since the Pliocene has shaped demographic changes in extant corals of the genus Orbicella, major extant reef builders in the Caribbean that today are endangered. We use genomic approaches to estimate previously unknown current and past population sizes over the last 3 million years. Populations of all three Orbicella declined around 2–1 million years ago, coincident with the extinction of at least 50% of Caribbean coral species. The estimated changes in population size are consistent across the three species despite their ecological differences. Subsequently, two shallow-water specialists expanded their population sizes at least 2-fold, over a time that overlaps with the disappearance of their sister competitor species O. nancyi (the organ-pipe Orbicella). Our study suggests that populations of Orbicella species are capable of rebounding from reductions in population size under suitable conditions and that the effective population size of modern corals provides rich standing genetic variation for corals to adapt to climate change. For conservation genetics, our study suggests the need to evaluate genetic variation under appropriate demographic models.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cub.2016.09.039
DO - 10.1016/j.cub.2016.09.039
M3 - Article
C2 - 27866895
AN - SCOPUS:85004024856
VL - 26
SP - 3190
EP - 3194
JO - Current Biology
JF - Current Biology
SN - 0960-9822
IS - 23
ER -