Two papers have just been published from the Castillo Lab at UNC! These were particularly exciting for me, as they were the main projects that I participated in during my undergraduate career. These papers officially mark my first appearance on peer review publication! Check out my personal summaries of each below, and read the papers using the links I have included:
Paper #1: Heterotrophy mitigates the temperate coral Oculina arbuscula response to temperature stress
Authors: Hannah Aichelman, Joseph Townsend (me), Travis Courtney, Justin Baumann, and Karl Castillo
Link to Paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.2399/full
What’s the big deal:
This paper details the results of two tank experiments conducted by Hannah Aichelman and myself during our undergraduate time in the Castillo Lab. The experiment provided differing levels of food to fragments of coral of the species Oculina arbuscula, a coral found in temperate waters. After measuring change in growth for 30 days, we repeated the experiment at a warmer temperature, to see if this thermal stress would impact the corals differently depending on the amount of food was available to the corals.
What we found was that corals that were in high stress environments and not fed performed worse than any of their fed or less stressed counterparts in terms of growth and symbiont density. Any opportunity at heterotrophy, whether only a small amount or a large amount, helped the coral both grow and reduced bleaching.
Check out the full paper using the link above. This project was the result of a lot hard work on Hannah’s part, and Hannah’s first publication. She has also just started her masters at Old Dominion University, and is continuing to research heterotrophy in corals. A big congratulations to her!!
Paper #2: Temperature regimes impact coral assemblages along environmental gradients on lagoonal reefs in Belize
Authors: Justin Baumann, Joseph Townsend (me), Travis Courtney, Hannah Aichelman, Sarah Davies, Karl Castillo
Link to Paper: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0162098
What’s the big deal:
This paper is the first chapter of Justin Baumann’s PhD work, and sets the groundwork for understanding how reef communities can be structured by temperature regimes rather than simply maximum or average temperature. The study characterized different areas of the backreef as low, moderate (or “average”), and high thermal stress using 4 temperature parameters. We then surveyed reefs within each of these temperature regimes, and found that coral community diversity, richness, and abundance all strongly differed in extreme environments compared to the moderate or low regime. In these extreme environments, the coral community has an observable shift to only corals that are slow growing, or grow quickly and die off. The moderate and low regimes had reefs with these same species, but also had corals with more diverse growth rates and abilities.
What this indicates is that as temperature regimes across Belize and the Caribbean shift to a more extreme temperature regime, this will drive a shift in the corals that succeed and dominate reefs. These reefs that are more reflective of extreme regime reefs will have mostly slow growing and fast growing but fragile species, as well as overall less abundant reef-building coral.
Read the entire paper using the link above, Justin also has posted a more complete summary on the UNder the C, The UNC Marine Science Department’s blog. This is Justin’s first chapter, and he is currently working on publishing the results of his chapters two and three of his PhD. A big congratulations to Justin!!