Small-sized invertebrates inhabiting hard substrates in coral reefs (a.k.a. cryptofauna) contribute substantially to reef biodiversity, but their patterns of distribution and ecological controls are poorly understood. Here, we characterized the cryptofauna community and explored “bottom-up” and “top-down” controls by benthic cover and fish abundance, respectively. We sampled the cryptofauna inhabiting the reef terrace from 13...

The recent rise of ‘omics and other molecular research technologies alongside improved techniques for tissue preservation have broadened the scope of marine mammal research. Collecting biological samples from wild marine mammals is both logistically challenging and expensive. To enhance the power of marine mammal research, great effort has been made in both the field and the laboratory to ensure the scientific integrity of sam...

Corals nucleate and grow aragonite crystals, organizing them into intricate skeletal structures that ultimately build the world’s coral reefs. Crystallography and chemistry have profound influence on the material properties of these skeletal building blocks, yet gaps remain in our knowledge about coral aragonite on the atomic scale. Across a broad diversity of shallow-water and deep-sea scleractinian corals from vastly differe...

Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) was initially documented in Florida in 2014 and outbreaks with similar characteristics have since appeared in disparate areas throughout the northern Caribbean, causing significant declines in coral communities. SCTLD is characterized by focal or multifocal lesions of denuded skeleton caused by rapid tissue loss and affects at least 22 reef-building species of Caribbean corals. A tissue-...

Summary There are a few baseline reef‐systems available for understanding the microbiology of healthy coral reefs and their surrounding seawater. Here, we examined the seawater microbial ecology of 25 Northern Caribbean reefs varying in human impact and protection in Cuba and the Florida Keys, USA, by measuring nutrient concentrations, microbial abundances, and respiration rates as well as sequencing bacterial and archaeal amp...

A detailed understanding of how diversity in endosymbiotic dinoflagellate communities maps onto the physiological range of coral hosts is critical to predicting how coral reef ecosystems will respond to climate change. Species‐level taxonomy of the dinoflagellate genus Symbiodinium has been predominantly examined using the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of the nuclear ribosomal array (rDNA ITS2) and downstream screen...