RRR - Matt Leray Lab

Funding: Mark and Rachel Rohr Foundation

RRR: “R” (Rohr) “R” (Reef), “R” (Resilience)

Objectives

The goal of the Rohr Reef Resilience Program is to assess how corals in the genus Pocillopora withstand and recover from environmental changes, specifically those caused by increased greenhouse gas emissions. More specifically, we use controlled experiments and field surveys to:

Determine how Pocillopora corals maintain essential physiological and biochemical processes in the face of thermal stress.

Assess how the response of corals to thermal anomalies differs among coral genotypes, among corals that associate with different clades of algal symbionts and among corals that have experienced different thermal regimes.

Establish a baseline of the natural variability in coral physiological conditions, coral microbiome structure, coral demography, and community composition across Panama and the Tropical Eastern Pacific that will be used to assess the impact of environmental extremes, such as El Niño events, on physiological functions at the individual level, population dynamics, and overall ecosystem structure.

Assess how variations in fish and macroinvertebrate community structure across different sites and regions of the TEP are associated with differences in coral assemblage structure and responses to environmental disturbances.

Quantify seasonal and interannual fluctuations in herbivory and predation rates on benthic organisms to assess how these processes contribute to regional differences in colonization and growth rates of algae and other invertebrates that can potentially adversely affect coral recovery.