RII Track-4: Surviving climate change: The role of adaptation and acclimatization in tropical corals

This Research Infrastructure Improvement RII Track-4 grant will study heat tolerance in coral populations. Corals are suffering thermal stress across the globe as a result of increases in water temperature of less than 2°C. Yet, some corals live in more extreme conditions.

Previous coral research shows that recurrent high temperatures can induce heat tolerance in reef-building corals. These results have been derived from small populations of corals in unusual reef settings with extreme daily variation in temperature. However, it is not well known whether these environments are much more common than currently believed and whether daily increases in temperature occur regularly on coral reefs.

The result will provide a model for discovering habitats where heat-resistant corals may be commonly found. The award will provide the opportunity for an early-career faculty and his graduate student from the University of Rhode Island (URI) to establish a new collaboration with professors at the Huck Institutes of the Life sciences at Pennsylvania State University.

Additionally, the project will generate a new workshop called DIVERSE and a K-6 coral reef science kit aimed at increasing the interest of underrepresented minority groups in STEM. Thus, this fellowship will help to promote diversity in STEM fields and strengthen URI's and Rhode Island's aim to build capacity in bioinformatics and computational biology.

This project will test the hypothesis that some reef zones repeatedly experience warmer temperatures and, as a result, harbor heat-resistant corals. The study will monitor temperature patterns across a wide range of reef habitats and locations and measure heat tolerance in one of the most threatened corals, Orbicella faveolata. To understand heat tolerance in corals and gain knowledge of where to locate heat-tolerant coral populations, this study will use a replicated Caribbean reef system and test physiological hypotheses about the mechanisms of heat tolerance.

The project will specifically address the following objectives: (1) determine profile variation in temperature across ten reef systems with a variety of reef habitats and test which habitats and sites harbor heat-tolerant corals; (2) analyze the performance of colonies in reciprocal transplants and examine the role of acclimation in heat tolerance; (3) establish the degree of heat tolerance across corals from different habitats and determine the genes underlying thermotolerance in corals using genomic tools. The experiments will be designed to test if phenotypic plasticity, widely viewed as an important trait in evolutionary ecology, is key for coral's ability to cope with warmer oceans.

Through manipulative trials, the project will also quantify the extent to which habitat-adapted populations are also interchangeable across habitats. The research will provide valuable information on the general rules about where to locate heat-tolerant corals, which may result in the ability to conduct a Caribbean-wide search for these habitats.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.