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Coral Reef Ecosystem Research at Hollings Marine Laboratory
Overview
Found in over 100 countries, coral reefs cover an estimated 284,300 km2. Per unit area, they are one of the world’s most valuable ecosystems in terms of ecological, economic and cultural capital, yet we are losing them at an accelerating rate.
Coral diseases and their compromised health status have dramatically increased in frequency and distribution over the last decade, leading to unprecedented decreases in live coral and altering the function and productivity of coral reef ecosystems. These declines have been linked to biotic and abiotic stressors and their synergistic interactions. Traditional coral health assessment, however, has only been able to detect stressor effects after degradation or disease outbreaks have occurred, thus providing only indirect measures of stressor effects. Responding to this threat requires improved scientific understanding and tools to:
- detect and assess trends in coral diseases at the necessary scales for scientific investigation and policy development;
- determine the causes and consequences of increasing disease frequency and distribution; and
- evaluate possible management responses designed to mitigate the spread and effects of disease on coral reef ecosystems and their users.
Over the last five years, a new paradigm has emerged for coral reef health assessment which promotes the use of methods that integrate descriptive science (e.g., a phenomenon has occurred) with mechanistic science (e.g., how has the phenomenon occurred). Our program is coupling principles and technologies of biomedical science with traditional measures of ecosystem health to develop an integrated approach for studying coral reef degradation. There are three areas of emphasis in the coral research program at the HML:
- biochemical and cellular physiologic approaches to determining health status of coral and elucidating causal linkages of natural and anthropogenic stressors on disease susceptibility;
- molecular microbiology for delineating the roles of microorganisms, particularly bacteria, in coral pathogenesis; and
- functional genomics and proteomics for biomarker discovery.