Environmental and geographical factors structure cauliflower coral's algal symbioses across the Indo‐Pacific
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim The symbioses between corals and endosymbiotic dinoflagellates have been described as a flexible relationship whose dynamics could serve as a source of resilience for coral reef ecosystems. However, the factors that drive the establishment and maintenance of this co‐evolutionary relationship remain unclear. We examined the environmental and geographical factors structuring dinoflagellate communities in a wide‐ranging Indo‐Pacific coral to begin to address this gap. Location Djibouti, Oman, Taiwan and French Polynesia. Taxon Cauliflower corals ( Pocillopora spp.), dinoflagellates (family Symbiodiniaceae). Methods We analysed publicly available amplicon sequence data from the nuclear ribosomal DNA internal transcribed spacer 2, originating from Pocillopora spp. We also compiled environmental data such as sea surface temperature (SST) and time since the last local mass bleaching event. We ran generalized least squares models, PERMANOVAs and indicator species analyses, to understand how thermal regimes and geographical distances impacted Pocillopora spp.'s Symbiodiniaceae community composition. Results Sea surface temperature was the most important factor driving Symbiodiniaceae community differences, with the largest effect size of the statistically significant factors. When focusing on individual Symbiodiniaceae genera, SST was likewise the most important factor. Our indicator species analyses revealed that specimens that had recently bleached were characterized by roughly equal proportions of Cladocopium spp. and Durusdinium spp., while specimens that had not recently bleached had a similar proportion of Durusdinium spp. as those that had recently bleached, but also showed a reduction in Cladocopium spp., with this deficiency made up by the presence of Symbiodinium spp. Main Conclusions We provide further support for the hypothesis that coral's Symbiodiniaceae communities could facilitate host resilience to thermal stress. Our work is in direct conversation with a larger body of biogeography literature that highlights how local environmental regimes can impact contemporary population structure, even in marine taxa with widespread distributions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".