Coral resistance to natural and anthropogenic disturbances

Abstract

The effects of natural (upwelling, tsunami) and human induced (eutrophication, overfishing, bomb fishing) disturbances to corals were investigated in highly diverse reefs of SE Asia. Firstly, coral recruitment patterns and their contribution to reef recovery and secondly, the corals metabolic flexibility in various environments were investigated. In addition, the bacterial community structure in biofilms was assessed in relation to environmental changes. In summary, the investigated coral reefs seem to be very dynamic visible in recruitment patterns and bacterial community structure being highly responsive to seasonal changes and being able to support reef recovery in most cases. The widely distributed coral species P. lutea and S. subseriata feature a highly flexible metabolism allowing their distribution even to environmental extremes. However, these corals belong to the minority as indicated by the loss of coral diversity in strongly polluted reefs, but it also shows a high interspecific variability, which provides high diversity reefs with a certain buffer capacity to environmental changes.