Award: OCE-1503483

The health of coral reefs is a global concern and has been the subject of widespread, global concern. Both coral bleaching and coral diseases have been documented as large contributors to the decline of reef ecosystems. More than a decade ago it was predicted the occurrence of more frequent coral bleaching events as a result of global warming, and for the first time that prediction materialized as a true event over the last couple years. In 2014 and 2015 coral reefs in the Florida Reef Tract (FRT) experienced consecutive anomalous increases of seawater temperature that caused mass bleaching events over two years in a row for the first time in these ecosystems. We had, based on a rapid response to the FRT Fall 2014 mass coral bleaching event, the opportunity to investigate the links between coral bleaching and coral disease at the process level and to compare coral and coral-associated microbial physiology on a pre- and post- bleaching basis. In this RAPID award we proposed specifically to explore the influences of coral genotype, mutualistic algal strain(s), and coral-associated bacterial community composition on bleaching/disease likelihood and recovery using the high resolution of next generation DNA sequencing. We were able to test the overall hypothesis that corals and their symbionts/associates are indeed building-block communities that are rearranged in response to environmental change and that some combinations fostered resistance and rapid recovery while others reflected slow recovery. While these results were perceived as a nugget of hope in terms of coral recovery from bleaching, we quickly learned that new symbiotic combinations providing resistant to bleaching where extremely affected by disease outbreak a few months after the second bleaching event in 2015. While some corals seemed to be quickly adjusting to the annually consecutive thermal events and thus become resistant to bleaching, the accumulative thermal stress effect appeared to have weakened the immunological capability of these corals and thus become vulnerable to disease development. The question now extends on to what is the additive effect of consecutive annual hyper-thermal stress, already happening, on the physiology of corals and its implications to their response during recovery not only to the abiotic environment but also to biotic factors such as pathogenic infections. Alarmingly unexpected, it is that these data show that corals affected by consecutive thermal anomalies are more susceptible to disease regardless of their acquired resistance capacity to bleaching. Beyond the intellectual merit, this project supported young scientists, from high school to undergraduate and graduate students, giving them multidisciplinary training at the interface of eco-physiology and coral microbiology. Research also included training of minority and female undergraduate and graduate students and provided opportunities for students to present some of the work associated to this grant in national and international conferences, featuring for instance the attendance of five students to the International Coral Reef Symposium held in Hawaii in 2016. Last Modified: 04/03/2017 Submitted by: Mauricio Rodriguez-Lanetty