Abstract
My internship project focused on determining which factors affect the healing rate of Acropora cervicornis. A. cervicornis populations have drastically declined throughout the Caribbean and Western Atlantic over recent decades. Due to its fast-growing branching morphology and ability to reproduce through fragmentation, it is used extensively in reef restoration programs. Studies have been conducted to study the healing rate of boulder corals and of Acroporids, but A. cervicornis is missing in the literature. I assessed if genotype, feeding and lipid content, and lesion location affected wound recovery.
I worked with the Benthic Ecology and Coral Restoration Lab to conduct this experiment. I used five different genotypes of A. cervicornis from South Florida to assess if there is any genotype effect on healing rate. Half of the samples of each genotype were fed to determine if an increase in nutrition inhibits or promotes healing. Each feeding treatment was split into two different lesion groups, each receiving either a side or a top lesion. Corals were considered “healed” when tissue and polyps fully covered the lesion and when the apical polyp at the tip started to be visible (Hall, 1997). Lipid content was assessed by analyzing tissue samples collected after lesions were healed.
Artificial lesions were created on April 1st and monitored three times a week to assess healing. Though there are apparent differences in the genotypes, coral genotype did not significantly affect the number of fragments healed. An increase in available nutrition should aid in recovery as increased nutrition promotes growth (Forsman et al., 2011), however I found that feeding treatment did not have a significant effect on recovery and there was no significant difference in the lipid content between genotypes. Scraping lesions are considered more severe than those obtained from fragmentation (Hall, 1997). In this experiment, the fragments with top lesions healed significantly more quickly than the side lesions.
These results will hopefully help restoration managers select which corals to propagate in their nurseries. Wound recovery is one of five traits to help determine resilient genets (Baums et al., 2019). Targeted restoration using resilient corals will help improve overall reef resilience, which will help mitigate the impacts from climate change.