Award: OCE-1829898

This award combined the expertise of Peter Edmunds (CSUN) and Scott Burgess (Florida State University) to address a key aspect of the Coral Reef Crisis in Moorea, French Polynesia. Here, the US National Science Foundation supports its only Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site focused on coral reefs, the Moorea Coral Reef (MCR) LTER. The goal of the MCR is a multi-decadal analysis of long-term changes in coral reefs, within which additional projects, like the present award, can be embedded to gain added value. The present award sought to understand how coral species ?hidden? within a complex of uniformly-shaped ?cauliflower corals? (scientifically, the genus Pocillopora) can mediate the ability of coral communities to respond to disturbances like storms and bleaching. This is a critical question to answer as scientists seek to understand whether coral reefs might survive the current century. For coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean, including those in Hawaii, Guam, and American Samoa, Cauliflower corals are dominant members of the reef, the success of which therefore is tied to the success of this group of corals. This concept supports the intellectual merits of the present award for it addresses a novel mechanism mediating the success of coral reefs in a warmer and more acidic future, and addresses a topic of broad biological interest: What is the ecological importance of species that hide among groups of species that together are impossible to distinguish by their shape and color alone? This award brought $76k to CSUN over four years to support the integration of the larger FSU award into the scientific infrastructure of the Moorea Coral Reef LTER, thus ensuring the final discoveries were more than the sum of the parts. Additionally, Edmunds led experimental work focused on determining the extent to which the hidden species of Cauliflower corals differ in their responses to environmental conditions like temperature and light. As luck would have it, the project started in September 2018 at a momentous time for coral reef biology and global history: 6 months later a major bleaching event impacted Moorea, ultimately killing most of the Cauliflower corals by August of the same year, and 17 months later, the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These two events profoundly affected the topics studied with this award, and the means by which they were studied in a world where travel and fieldwork were curtailed. First, our work pivoted to applying our concepts of hidden coral species to better understand the effects of the 2019 bleaching using photographic and genetic samples that could be studied during the global lockdown. With our collaborator, Scott Burgess, having developed the genetic tools to identify the hidden species of Cauliflower corals within the first 6 months of the award, our sampling in 2019 focused on revealing the impacts of hidden species on bleaching and coral death. What initially appeared to be a size-dependent event, where big corals died while small corals survived, turned out to be a result of hidden, bleaching susceptible large species dying, while smaller bleaching resistant species survived. Further, collaborations with colleagues in Hong Kong (and Scripps Oceanographic Institute and UC Santa Barbara) led to the discovery that the 2019 bleaching in Moorea was particularly damaging because local oceanographic conditions impeded the ability of deeper water to provide a cooling effect for corals in deeper water. Most of these discoveries unfolded slowly during the constraints of the pandemic, but by 2022 it became feasible to conduct lengthier research expeditions to Moorea. This opportunity was used to begin analyses of the performance of Cauliflower corals in controlled experiments, and this work has revealed functional differences among the hidden species. These effects are related to the extent to which coral branches are packed tightly within single colonies, and the more fundamental ways by which different species physiologically tolerate high temperature. The broader impacts of this award have been built on the strengths of allying a 4-year Hispanic-serving MS institution (CSUN) with a leading R1 university in Florida (FSU), supporting opportunities for field and lab research to graduate and undergraduate students at CSUN, and extending the impacts of the research to high schools close to CSUN. Graduate students and technical staff from CSUN were integrally involved in the collection of the field data supporting this award, and in conducting laboratory experiments with hidden species of coral. The concepts and questions at the core of this work have been presented at local high schools ? Viewpoint and Campbell Hall ? and teachers have worked with the project to develop independent study projects that have enriched their classroom instruction in science. Last Modified: 09/03/2023 Submitted by: Peter J Edmunds