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Porites lobata (yellow) and P.compressa (bluish-purple) from Maui. Photo by Zac Forsman
Shape-Shifting Coral
Manoa Postdoctoral Fellow Zac Forsman led a team of researchers that used genetic markers to examine coral groupings and investigated how these markers related to alterations in shape. The study was published in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.
The researchers discovered that the inaccurate picture of coral species is compromising the ability to conserve coral reefs. The evolutionary tendency of corals to alter their skeletal structure makes it difficult to assign them to different species.
Skeletal shape is currently used to differentiate coral species. According to the authors, this can make them notoriously difficult to tell apart as shape can change independent of reproductive isolation or evolutionary divergence, the factors most commonly understood to define ‘species’. By studying the genetic characteristics of corals at several regions of the genome, Forsman and his colleagues were able to confirm many morphological species groupings, while finding evidence that appearances are very deceiving in a few groups; some corals were genetically indistinguishable despite differing in size and shape, such as branching and massive corals, whereas some corals with similar appearance had deep genetic divergence.
“Our study represents important progress towards understanding the evolution and biodiversity of corals, and provides a foundation for future work,” says Forsman.
The other Manoa researchers are graduate student Daniel Barshis, Associate Professor Cynthia Hunter and Associate Researcher Robert Toonen.