Allometric growth in reef-building corals
Abstract
Predicting demographic rates is a critical part of forecasting the future of ecosystems under global change. Here, we test if growth rates can be predicted from morphological traits for a highly diverse group of colonial symbiotic organisms: scleractinian corals. We ask whether growth is isometric or allometric among corals, and whether most variation in coral growth rates occurs at the level of the species or morphological group. We estimate growth as change in planar area for 11 species, across five morphological groups and over 5 years. We show that coral growth rates are best predicted from colony size and morphology rather than species. Coral size follows a power scaling law with a constant exponent of 0.91. Despite being colonial organisms, corals have consistent allometric scaling in growth. This consistency simplifies the task of projecting community responses to disturbance and climate change.
Citation
Dornelas , M , Madin , J S , Baird , A H & Connolly , S R 2017 , ' Allometric growth in reef-building corals ' , Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , vol. 284 , no. 1851 , 20170053 . https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.0053
Publication
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0962-8452Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2017, the Author(s). This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org / https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.0053
Description
Funding: ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Australian Research Council for fellowship and research support; Scottish Funding Council (MASTS, grant reference HR09011) and the ERC project bioTIME.Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.