Linking heat stress resistance and recovery in reef-building corals
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Organisms are facing more intense and frequent stress events in their environments due to climate change impacts, and resilience capacity plays a vital role in survival and persistence through generations. Two important components of stress resilience are the ability to resist and recover from stress. Yet, there is limited understanding of how mechanisms of an individual's resistance and recovery ability contribute to overall resilience, how resistance and recovery may be linked, and whether there are other physiological tradeoffs associated with resistance and recovery. Reef-building corals are the foundational taxa of highly diverse and productive marine ecosystems, and ocean warming represents one of the biggest threats facing corals currently and under future climate change scenarios. Yet, experiments on coral resilience research focuses primarily on identifying and bottling those corals that are predicted to excel at bleaching resistance. However, as our oceans continue to warm, even the most bleaching resistant corals will be at a high risk of bleaching. Therefore, it is valuable to shift focus toward comprehensively evaluating the interconnectedness of other stress resilience factors, like heat stress resistance and recovery. In this dissertation, I characterize patterns of individual heat stress resistance and recovery ability in the tabletop coral Acropora hyacinthus. I show that mortality after short-term heat stress occurs rapidly and is positively correlated with bleaching severity, bleaching state is stable after heat stress, and there is a high likelihood of longer-term recovery if corals survive the first week post-stress. I also show that moderately resistant corals exhibit higher skeletal growth than low and high resistant corals by four months post-heat stress, and that there is significant differential gene expression between low, moderate, and high resistant corals at pre- and post-heat stress timepoints that may illuminate underlying mechanisms of individual resistance and recovery. These results provide insight into putative links between coral heat stress resistance and recovery, and fitness tradeoffs associated with resilience capacity.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Walker, Nia Symone |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Palumbi, Stephen R |
| Thesis advisor | Palumbi, Stephen R |
| Thesis advisor | Grottoli, Andrea |
| Thesis advisor | Hadly, Elizabeth Anne, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | Pringle, John R, 1943- |
| Degree committee member | Grottoli, Andrea |
| Degree committee member | Hadly, Elizabeth Anne, 1958- |
| Degree committee member | Pringle, John R, 1943- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Biology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Nia Symone Walker. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Biology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/pt880yf3266 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Nia Symone Walker
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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