Coral bleaching, the stress‐induced breakdown of coral‐algal symbiosis, threatens reefs globally. Paradoxically, despite adverse fitness effects, corals bleach annually, even outside of abnormal temperatures. This generally occurs shortly after the once‐per‐year mass coral spawning. Here, we propose a hypothesis linking annual coral bleaching and the transmission of symbionts to the next generation of coral hosts. We developed...

Ancient DNA (aDNA) has been applied to evolutionary questions across a wide variety of taxa. Here, for the first time, we utilized aDNA from millennia‐old fossil coral fragments to gain new insights into a rapidly declining western Atlantic reef ecosystem. We sampled four Acropora palmata fragments (dated 4215 BCE to 1099 CE) obtained from two Florida Keys reef cores. From these samples, we established that it is possible both...

The global impacts of climate change are evident in every marine ecosystem. On coral reefs, mass coral bleaching and mortality have emerged as ubiquitous responses to ocean warming, yet one of the greatest challenges of this epiphenomenon is linking information across scientific disciplines and spatial and temporal scales. Here we review some of the seminal and recent coral‐bleaching discoveries from an ecological, physiologic...

We are writing in response to the population and phylogenomics meeting review by Andrews & Luikart ( ) entitled ‘Recent novel approaches for population genomics data analysis’. Restriction‐site‐associated DNA ( RAD ) sequencing has become a powerful and useful approach in molecular ecology, with several different published methods now available to molecular ecologists, none of which can be considered the best option in all sit...