Mallela J, Crabbe M J C
Department of Life Sciences, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, The West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago.
Mar Environ Res. 2009 Oct;68(4):158-62. doi: 10.1016/j.marenvres.2009.06.001. Epub 2009 Jun 6.
Knowledge of coral recruitment patterns helps us understand how reefs react following major disturbances and provides us with an early warning system for predicting future reef health problems. We have reconstructed and interpreted historical and modern-day recruitment patterns, using a combination of growth modelling and in situ recruitment experiments, in order to understand how hurricanes, storms and bleaching events have influenced coral recruitment on the Caribbean coastline of Tobago. Whilst Tobago does not lie within the main hurricane belt results indicate that regional hurricane events negatively impact coral recruitment patterns in the Southern Caribbean. In years following hurricanes, tropical storms and bleaching events, coral recruitment was reduced when compared to normal years (p=0.016). Following Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and the 2005-2006 bleaching event, coral recruitment was markedly limited with only 2% (n=6) of colonies estimated to have recruited during 2006 and 2007. Our experimental results indicate that despite multiple large-scale disturbances corals are still recruiting on Tobago's marginal reef systems, albeit in low numbers.
了解珊瑚的补充模式有助于我们理解珊瑚礁在遭受重大干扰后的反应，并为我们提供一个预测未来珊瑚礁健康问题的早期预警系统。我们结合生长模型和原位补充实验，重建并解读了历史和现代的补充模式，以了解飓风、风暴和白化事件如何影响多巴哥加勒比海岸线的珊瑚补充。虽然多巴哥并不位于主要飓风带内，但结果表明，区域性飓风事件会对加勒比海南部的珊瑚补充模式产生负面影响。在飓风、热带风暴和白化事件发生后的年份里，与正常年份相比，珊瑚补充量有所减少（p = 0.016）。在2004年伊万飓风和2005 - 2006年白化事件之后，珊瑚补充明显受限，估计在2006年和2007年期间只有2%（n = 6）的珊瑚群落进行了补充。我们的实验结果表明，尽管遭受了多次大规模干扰，多巴哥边缘珊瑚礁系统上仍有珊瑚在进行补充，尽管数量很少。
