Thermal extremes likely trigger metabolic imbalance in coral holobionts.

ABSTRACT: Rising ocean temperatures are constraining the availability of dissolved oxygen and simultaneously increasing the respiratory oxygen requirements of marine organisms. This is particularly relevant for tropical corals, as periods of anomalously high temperature destabilize the symbiosis between corals and Symbiodiniaceae, resulting in coral bleaching. These observations point towards a possible role of mismatched rates of photosynthetic oxygen production and consumption in contributing to the breakdown of the holobiont under heat stress. Here we use a global dataset comprising experimentally derived relationships between coral metabolic rates and temperature to investigate this hypothesis. Across all available relationships, we calculated and analysed the activation energy (E), optimum temp

SUBMITTER: Parry AJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12475267 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature