Award: OCE-1547921

As climate change progresses and extreme temperature events increase in frequency, rates of disturbance may soon outpace the capacity of certain species of reef-building coral to recover. This may lead to dramatic shifts in community composition and ecosystem function. However, some coral species include individual colonies living well in high-heat environments, and these have been proposed as important nursery stock for future restoration. But heat-tolerance could be due to adjustable physiology or the microbiome or different symbionts, so whether colonies retain their tolerance and resist bleaching when moved into nurseries remains unclear. We showed that colonies from heat-tolerant parent corals showed two-fold to three-fold less bleaching, compared with corals from less heat-tolerant parent species, even after 8 months of acclimatization in a common garden. These results suggest that selecting coral colonies that can withstand warm ocean conditions can aid the development of nurseries for climate-resilient corals. In addition, understanding variation in rates of bleaching recovery among species and how that translates to resilience to recurrent bleaching is fundamental to predicting the impacts of increasing disturbances on coral reefs globally. We tracked the response of two heat sensitive species in the genus Acroporato repeated bleaching events during the austral summers of 2015 and 2017. Our data uncovered unexpected variation in a group of corals thought generally to be heat-sensitive, and therefore paint a more optimistic view of the future health of coral reef ecosystems against a backdrop of increasing thermal disturbances. Last Modified: 05/06/2019 Submitted by: Stephen R Palumbi