Microbial communities fundamentally shape ecosystem function and biodiversity across all biological systems through complex dynamics. In coral reef ecosystems, understanding the dynamics of these microbial communities has become critical for predicting reef responses to environmental stressors. Fish skin microbiota are highly susceptible to environmental changes and may vary significantly across species and geographic location...

Coastal currents can vary dramatically in space and time, influencing advection and residence time of larvae, nutrients and contaminants in coastal environments. However, spatial and temporal variabilities of the residence time of these materials in coastal environments, such as coastal bays, are rarely quantified in ecological applications. Here, we use a particle tracking model built on top of the high-resolution hydrodynami...

Physical conditions in coastal ecosystems can vary dramatically in space and time, influencing marine habitats and species distribution. However, such physical variability is often overlooked in ecological research, particularly in coral reef research and conservation. This study aims to quantify fine-scale variability in the physical conditions of a coastal environment to provide critical context for coastal ecosystem conserv...

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...

Coral reef ecosystems are now commonly affected by major climate and disease disturbances. Disturbance impacts are typically recorded using reef benthic cover, but this may be less reflective of other ecosystem processes. To explore the potential for reef water‐based disturbance indicators, we conducted a 7‐year time series on US Virgin Island reefs where we examined benthic cover and reef water nutrients and microorganisms fr...

The settlement of coral larvae is an important process which contributes to the success and longevity of coral reefs. Coral larvae often recruit to benthic structures covered with crustose coralline algae (CCA) which produce cues that promote settlement and metamorphosis. The Peysonneliaceae Ramicrusta spp. are red-brown encrusting alga that have recently become abundant on shallow Caribbean reefs, replacing CCA habitat, overg...

Summary Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease (SCTLD) is a devastating disease. Since 2014, it has spread along the entire Florida Reef Tract and into the greater Caribbean. It was first detected in the United States Virgin Islands in January 2019. To more quickly identify microbial bioindicators of disease, we developed a rapid pipeline for microbiome sequencing. Over a span of 10 days we collected, processed and sequenced coral an...

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-...

Coral reef ecosystems are incredibly diverse marine biomes that rely on nutrient cycling by microorganisms to sustain high productivity in generally oligotrophic regions of the ocean. Understanding the composition of extracellular reef metabolites in seawater, the small organic molecules that serve as the currency for microorganisms, may provide insight into benthic-pelagic coupling as well as the complexity of nutrient cyclin...

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...

Scleractinian corals are bathed in a sea of planktonic and particle‐associated microorganisms. The metabolic products of corals influence the growth and composition of microorganisms, but interactions between corals and seawater microorganisms are underexplored. We conducted a field‐based survey to compare the biomass, diversity, composition, and functional capacity of microorganisms in small‐volume seawater samples collected...

Picoplankton foster essential recycling of nutrients in the oligotrophic waters sustaining coral reef ecosystems. Despite this fact, there is a paucity of data on how the specific interactions between corals and planktonic bacteria and archaea (picoplankton) contribute to nutrient dynamics and reef productivity. Here, we utilized mesocosm experiments to investigate how corals and coral mucus influence picoplankton and nutrient...

Summary Cultivation‐based studies have demonstrated that yellow‐band disease ( YBD ), a lesion‐producing ailment affecting diverse species of coral, is caused by a consortium of V ibrio spp. This study takes the first cultivation‐independent approach to examine the whole bacterial community associated with YBD ‐like lesioned corals. Two species of F ungiidae corals, C tenactis crassa and H erpolitha limax , displaying YBD ‐lik...

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...