The rise of octocoral forests on Caribbean reefs
Résumé
Coral reefs throughout the tropics have experienced large declines in the abundance of
scleractinian corals over the last few decades, and some reefs are becoming functionally
dominated by animal taxa other than scleractinians. This phenomenon is striking on
many shallow reefs in the tropical western Atlantic, where arborescent octocorals
now are numerically and functionally dominant. Octocorals are one of several taxa that
have been overlooked for decades in analyses of coral reef community dynamics, and
our understanding of why octocorals are favoured (whereas scleractinians are not) on
some modern reefs, and how they will affect the function of future reef communities, is
not commensurate with the task of scientifically responding to the coral reef crisis. We
summarize the biological and ecological features predisposing octocorals for success
under contemporary conditions, and focus on those features that could have generated
resistance and resilience of octocoral populations to environmental change on modern
reefs. There is a rich set of opportunities for rapid advancement in understanding the
factors driving the success of octocorals on modern reefs, but we underscore three lines
of inquiry: (1) the functional implications of strongly mixotrophic, polytrophic, and plastic
nutrition, (2) the capacity to recruit at high densities and maintain rapid initial rates of
vertical growth, and (3) the emergent properties associated with dense animal forests at
high colony densities.
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RevBR Octocoral Review_2_July_2020_Final copy+HRL_LOR_HAL.pdf (1.63 Mo)
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