Topography and spatial arrangement of reef-building corals on the fringing reefs of North Jamaica may influence their response to disturbance from bleaching

M.J.C. Crabbe

Knowledge of factors that are important in reef resilience help us understand how reefs react following major environmental disturbances such as hurricanes and bleaching. Here we test factors that might have influenced Jamaican reef resilience to, and subsequent recovery from, the 2005 bleaching event, and which might help inform management policy for reefs in the future: reef rugosity and contact of corals with macroalgae. In addition,we test in the field, on Dairy Bull reef, whether aggregated colonies exhibit enhanced growth when exposed to superior competition from , as has been found by experiment with the Indo-Pacific corals and the superior competitor (Idjadi and Karlson, 2007).

Mots clés: tropical storms; hurricanes; rugosity; climate change; Caribbean; global warming; coral growth; recruitment; Discovery Bay; resilience; growth rates

M.J.C. Crabbe. Topography and spatial arrangement of reef-building corals on the fringing reefs of North Jamaica may influence their response to disturbance from bleaching. Marine Environmental Research, 2010, 69 (3), pp.158. ⟨10.1016/j.marenvres.2009.09.007⟩. ⟨hal-00565107⟩