The evolutionary success of animal design is strongly affected by scaling and virtually all metazoans are constrained by allometry. One body plan that appears to relax these constraints is a colonial modular (CM) design, in which modular iteration is . . .

While the decline in cover of scleractinian corals on Caribbean reefs is well known, little attention has been paid to other taxa that might covary in abundance. This study focused on octocorals around St. John and St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, in or . . .

Coral larvae are selective with regards to the surfaces upon which they settle, but little is known about the outcome of these choices. In this study, we explored the implications for juvenile scleractinians (< 40-mm diameter) of growing on igneous ve . . .

The evolutionary success of animal design is strongly affected by scaling and virtually all metazoans are constrained by allometry. One body plan that appears to relax these constraints is a colonial modular (CM) design, in which modular iteration is . . .

Most coral reefs differ from those visited by explorers in the 15th century and described by ecologists in the 1950s, and reports of degraded reefs and hypotheses regarding the implications of the changes abound. Tests of these hypotheses require deca . . .

Scleractinian corals on tropical reefs are exposed to many natural and anthropogenic disturbances, and while much is known about their responses to such conditions, it is unclear whether the responses will remain the same in a future affected by clima . . .

Juvenile life stages play critical roles in the population dynamics of virtually all organisms, and therefore precise estimates of juvenile growth and survival are important for accurate demographic analyses. For tropical reef corals, the contribution . . .

Disturbances are integral features of coral reefs, but since the 1970s they have degraded reefs throughout the world. While these events are well known, it is unclear how the perturbed communities will respond to further assaults. Here, we describe th . . .

The effects of corallivory on small colonies of massive Porites spp. (<5 cm diameter) and Pocillopora meandrina (<7 cm high) were explored in situ on shallow reefs in Moorea, French Polynesia. Experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that cor . . .

Efforts to evaluate the response of coral larvae to global climate change (GCC) and ocean acidification (OA) typically employ short experiments of fixed length, yet it is unknown how the response is affected by exposure duration. In this study, we exp . . .

We tested the effects of pCO2 on Seriatopora caliendrum recruits over the first 5.3 d of post-settlement existence. In March 2011, 11–20 larvae were settled in glass vials (3.2 mL) and incubated at 24.0 °C and ~ 250 μmol quanta m− 2 s− 1 while supplie . . .

Global climate change (GCC) is the most widespread environmental peril facing tropical coral reefs, yet the capacity of scleractinian corals to survive the challenge is not well understood. Acclimatization is a primary mechanism by which organisms mat . . .

We tested the hypothesis that ocean acidification (OA) affects spatial competition among scleractinian corals. Competitive ability was evaluated indirectly by linear extension of Porites lutea and Montipora aequituberculata placed in intraspecific, in . . .

We tested for depth‐dependent vertical zonation in coral reef community structure with surveys conducted in 2013 at 10 m and 27 m depth off the islands of Moorea, Tahiti, Maiao, and Tetiaroa, which are distributed over ~3500 km2 of the tropical south . . .

The recruitment of scleractinian corals to settlement tiles is widely used to infer relative rates of recruitment to natural reef surfaces. On tiles fixed approximately horizontally, the majority of corals settle to lower surfaces, and it is assumed t . . .

In this study, coral recruitment was measured on a kilometer-wide scale over two years on shallow (5-6 m depth) fringing reefs in St. John, US Virgin Islands, with the objective of determining the extent to which variation in recruitment was affected . . .

Increasing body size exposes the structural, functional, and geometric constraints of phenotype design (Schmidt-Nielsen 1984) which result in scaling effects that have a pervasive and profound influence on organismic physiology (Gould 1966; Schmidt-Ni . . .

The objective of this study was to test whether elevated pCO2 predicted for the year 2100 (85.1 Pa) affects bleaching in the coral Seriatopora caliendrum (Ehrenberg 1834) either independently or interactively with high temperature (30.5 °C). Response . . .

Theory suggests that density-associated processes can modulate community resilience following declines in population size. Here, we demonstrate density-associated processes in two scleractinian populations on the outer reef of Moorea, French Polynesia . . .