Incident light and morphology determine coral productivity along a shallow to mesophotic depth gradient.

ABSTRACT: While the effects of irradiance on coral productivity are well known, corals along a shallow to mesophotic depth gradient (10-100 m) experience incident irradiances determined by the optical properties of the water column, coral morphology, and reef topography.Modeling of productivity (i.e., carbon fixation) using empirical data shows that hemispherical colonies photosynthetically fix significantly greater amounts of carbon across all depths, and throughout the day, compared with plating and branching morphologies. In addition, topography (i.e., substrate angle) further influences the rate of productivity of corals but does not change the hierarchy of coral morphologies relative to productivity.The differences in primary productivity for different coral morphologies are not, however, entir

SUBMITTER: Lesser MP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8495790 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature