Negative parental and offspring environmental effects of macroalgae on coral recruitment are linked with alterations in the coral larval microbiome
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The persistence of reef-building corals is threatened by macroalgal competitors leading to a major demographic bottleneck in coral recruitment. Whether parental effects exist under coral–algal competition and whether they influence offspring performance via microbiome alterations represent major gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms by which macroalgae may hinder coral recovery. We investigated the diversity, variability and composition of the microbiome of adults and larvae of the coral Pocillopora acuta and surrounding benthic substrate on algal-removed and algal-dominated bommies. We then assessed the relative influence of parental and offspring environmental effects on coral recruitment processes by reciprocally exposing coral larvae from two parental origins (algal-removed and algal-dominated bommies) to algal-removed and algal-dominated environmental conditions. Dense macroalgal assemblages impacted the microbiome composition of coral larvae. Larvae produced by parents from algal-dominated bommies were depleted in putative beneficial bacteria and enriched in opportunistic taxa. These larvae had a significantly lower survival compared to larvae from algal-removed bommies regardless of environmental conditions. In contrast, algal-induced parental and offspring environmental effects interacted to reduce the survival of coral recruits. Together our results demonstrate negative algal-induced parental and offspring environmental effects on coral recruitment that could be mediated by alterations in the offspring microbiome.
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".