School of Zoology, The George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, 69978, Tel-Aviv, Israel.
Institute for Global Ecology, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, 32901, FL, USA.
Commun Biol. 2021 Feb 15;4(1):202. doi: 10.1038/s42003-021-01727-9.
Historically, marine populations were considered to be interconnected across large geographic regions due to the lack of apparent physical barriers to dispersal, coupled with a potentially widely dispersive pelagic larval stage. Recent studies, however, are providing increasing evidence of small-scale genetic segregation of populations across habitats and depths, separated in some cases by only a few dozen meters. Here, we performed a series of ex-situ and in-situ experiments using coral larvae of three brooding species from contrasting shallow- and deep-water reef habitats, and show that their settlement success, habitat choices, and subsequent survival are substantially influenced by parental effects in a habitat-dependent manner. Generally, larvae originating from deep-water corals, which experience less variable conditions, expressed more specific responses than shallow-water larvae, with a higher settlement success in simulated parental-habitat conditions. Survival of juvenile corals experimentally translocated to the sea was significantly lower when not at parental depths. We conclude that local adaptations and parental effects alongside larval selectivity and phenotype-environment mismatches combine to create invisible semipermeable barriers to coral dispersal and connectivity, leading to habitat-dependent population segregation.
从历史上看，由于缺乏明显的扩散物理屏障，再加上潜在的广泛扩散的浮游幼虫阶段，海洋种群被认为是在大地理区域相互关联的。然而，最近的研究越来越多地提供了种群在栖息地和深度上小规模遗传隔离的证据，在某些情况下，这些种群仅被几十米隔开。在这里，我们使用来自对比浅海和深海珊瑚礁栖息地的三种育幼物种的珊瑚幼虫进行了一系列的离体和在体实验，结果表明，它们的定居成功率、栖息地选择和随后的生存受到父母效应的显著影响，这种影响具有栖息地依赖性。通常情况下，来自经历较少变化条件的深水珊瑚的幼虫比来自浅水珊瑚的幼虫表现出更具体的反应，在模拟的亲代栖息地条件下，其定居成功率更高。当幼珊瑚被实验性地转移到海洋中时，如果不在亲代深度，其存活率显著降低。我们的结论是，局部适应和父母效应，以及幼虫的选择性和表型-环境不匹配，共同形成了对珊瑚扩散和连通性的无形半渗透障碍，导致了栖息地依赖的种群隔离。
