Contact‐ and Water‐Mediated Interactions With an Allelopathic Macroalga Drive Distinct Coral Microbiome and Metabolome
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Macroalgal proliferation constitutes a major threat to coral reef resilience. Macroalgae can affect corals by altering their microbiome and metabolome. However, our understanding of the spatial scale of these effects and the influence of environmental factors is limited. We conducted a manipulative field experiment to investigate how interaction types (direct contact and close proximity) with the allelopathic macroalga Dictyota bartayresiana and prevailing water current influence the microbiome and metabolome of the coral Pocillopora acuta and its near-surface seawater. Coral tissue damage was spatially constrained to the algal contact zone. Direct contact caused significant increases in harmful bacteria at the expense of beneficial ones in side coral fragments. Non-significant changes were observed within the microbiome of apex fragments, suggesting a resistance of the coral holobiont to colony-wide microbial colonisation. The coral metabolome responded to both algal contact and proximity. We detected several compounds potentially relevant for oxidative stress mitigation and coral defence. This metabolomic response was similar between apex and side fragments, supportive of a colony-wide metabolomic response. In the near-surface coral seawater, only a microbial response to algal contact was detected. We conclude that coral holobionts are capable of colony-wide metabolomic responses to maintain homeostasis against macroalgal competitors.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".