Coral restoration can drive rapid increases in reef accretion potential Scientific Reports - Coral restoration can drive rapid increases in reef accretion potential

🌊 Today's #DailyCoralRead shows coral outplanting can boost reef accretion & structural complexity - depending on the species! 🪸

This is great news for #biodiversity 🐠🦀 since complex reefs support fish & invertebrates.

#coralreefs #coralconservation

The tables have turned: taxonomy, systematics and biogeography of the Acropora hyacinthus (Scleractinia: Acroporidae) complex Genomic data have revealed that traditional coral taxonomy based on skeletal morphology does not accurately reflect the true diversity of, or systematic relationships within, the order Scleractinia. Here, we apply an integrated taxonomic approach combining molecular analysis and morphological comparison of type material with specimens collected from across the Indo-Pacific to revise the taxonomy of a clade within the species-rich and ecologically dominant reef coral genus Acropora, which includes the species Acropora hyacinthus (Dana, 1846) and related species (termed the ‘hyacinthus species complex’). Using a collection of specimens comprising preserved tissues, field images and skeletal vouchers collected from 22 regions spanning the Indian and Pacific Oceans, we generated a phylogenomic reconstruction using targeted capture of ultraconserved elements (UCEs) and exons, combined with examination of morphological characters, to generate primary species hypotheses (PSHs) for the clade. We then tested PSHs by calling Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNPs) from the genomic dataset to provide additional lines of evidence to support the delineation of species within the clade and revise the taxonomy of the group. Our integrated approach recovered 16 lineages sufficiently delineated to be designated as distinct species. Based on comparison of our specimens to type material and geographical distributions, we remove nine species from synonymy: A. turbinata (Verrrill, 1864), A. surculosa (Dana, 1846), A. patella (Studer, 1878), A. flabelliformis (Milne-Edwards, 1860), A. conferta (Quelch, 1886), A pectinata (Brook, 1892), A. recumbens (Brook, 1892), A. sinensis (Brook, 1893) and A. bifurcata Nemenzo, 1971. We also describe five new species: A. harriottae sp. nov. from south-eastern Australia, A. tersa sp. nov. from eastern Australia and the Western Pacific, A. nyinggulu sp. nov. from the eastern Indian Ocean, Indo-Australian Archipelago and southern Japan, A. uogi sp. nov. from the western Pacific and A. kalindae sp. nov. from north-eastern Australia. Our data reveal that the species richness within this clade of Acropora is far greater than currently assumed due to both overlooked provincialism across the Indo-Pacific as well as lumping of distinct sympatric species based on superficial morphological similarity. Given the key ecological role tabular Acropora play on Indo-Pacific reefs our findings have significant implications for reef conservation and management, for example, A. harriottae sp. nov. is restricted to a small geographical region of south-eastern Australia and is therefore at comparatively high risk of extinction. ZooBank: urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:6C42546C-9253-4639-9FF4-D8D80808D78C

Today's #DailyCoralRead by Rassmussen et al. shows us we can’t always trust our eyes 🙈

They revise the Acropora hyacinthus complex, revealing 5 new species once all thought to be A. hyacinthus! 🧪🪸

www.publish.csiro.au...

#coralreefs #marinegenomics

🪸 Today’s #DailyCoralRead introduces HERS—Host Evaluation of Reliance on Symbionts—a new metric for quantifying host dependence on symbiont autotrophy using stable isotope ellipse overlap in C & N space. Cool new tool for holobiont nutritional ecology!

http://tiny.cc/70hq001

Nearly T2T, phased genome assemblies of corals reveal haplotype diversity and the evolutionary process of gene expansion Abstract. Gene family expansion illustrates a critical aspect of evolutionary adaptation. However, the mechanisms by which gene family expansions emerge an

Today’s #DailyCoralRead 📖🪸

🧬 Two new telomere-to-telomere genome assemblies for Acropora digitifera and A. tenuis! 🧬

The study reveals highly disordered genomic regions with potentially neofunctionalized genes from lineage-specific expansions. 🧪

🔗 http://tiny.cc/z61q001

Flexibility in Gene Coexpression at Developmental and Evolutionary Timescales The explosion of next-generation sequencing technologies has allowed researchers to move from studying single genes to thousands of genes, and thereby to also consider the relationships within gene networks. Like others, we are interested in understanding how developmental and evolutionary forces shape the expression of individual genes, as well as the interactions among genes. In pursuing these questions, we confronted the central challenge that standard approaches fail to control the Type I error and/or have low power in the presence of high dimensionality (i.e., large number of genes) and small sample size, as in many gene expression studies. To overcome these challenges, we used random projection tests and correlation network comparisons to characterize differences in network connectivity and density. We detail central challenges, discuss sample size guidelines, and provide rigorous statistical approaches for exploring coexpression differences with small sample sizes. We apply these approaches in a species known for rapid adaptation – the Trinidadian guppy ( Poecilia reticulata ). Our findings provide evidence for coexpression network differences at developmental and evolutionary timescales and suggest that flexibility in gene coexpression relationships could promote evolvability. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. National Science Foundation, DDIG-1311680, RCN IOS-1256839, IOS-1354755, IOS 1922701 US Department of Energy, DE-SC0018344 National Institutes of Health, https://ror.org/01cwqze88, NIH R01GM144961

🐠 🧪 Today’s #DailyCoralRead is a preprint recently released by Fischer et al. who discovered big differences in gene coexpression network topology between two recently diverged guppy lineages!

🔗 www.biorxiv.org/cont...

A thread 🧵👇🏻

🪸 Today's #DailyCoralRead is actually a study on European Poplar! Learning from other systems can help progress #CoralReefScience! 🧪🌳

doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Read more for my take 👇🏻