What is it about?
Cryptic coral lineages can exhibit varied responses to environmental changes. In this study, we identified cryptic genetic lineages within six coral species sampled around St. Croix, USVI. We found that cryptic coral community composition is influenced by both depth and local environmental conditions across the seascape.
Featured Image
Photo by Daniel Öberg on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Understanding community turnover across a seascape is important to consider when outplanting corals to restore a reef, as locally-adapted lineages may have differential fitness in different environmental conditions.
Perspectives
The first five authors of this article are undergraduates, and I'm incredibly proud of all their hard work over many years to produce these findings. Each student selected their own species of coral to study, and each of them learned to independently pursue the whole research process on their respective sample sets- from extracting DNA, to 2bRAD library prep, to bioinformatic analyses using HPC systems, to data visualization in R, to scientific writing. In the end, after detecting multiple cryptic lineages in everyone's species, we decided to combine their results in a single manuscript about the coral community.
Kristina Black
NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cryptic coral community composition across environmental gradients, PLOS One, February 2025, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0318653.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
