(Press-News.org) Washington, DC-- Algae colonizing dead coral are upending scientists' ability to accurately assess the health of a coral reef community, according to new work from a team of marine science experts led by Carnegie's Manoela Romanó de Orte and Ken Caldeira. Their findings are published in Limnology and Oceanography.
Corals are marine invertebrates that build tiny exoskeletons, which accumulate to form giant coral reefs. Widely appreciated for their beauty, these reefs are havens for biodiversity and crucial for the economies of many coastal communities. But they are endangered by ocean warming, seawater acidification, extreme storms, pollution, and overfishing.
Coral reefs use calcium carbonate to construct their architecture, a process called calcification. For a reef to be healthy, its coral's building activities must exceed erosion, a natural phenomenon that is exacerbated by all the environmental stresses to which human activity is exposing them.
"Coral reefs are dealing with so many simultaneous threats, many of which directly inhibit their ability to grow at a sustainable rate," Caldeira explained. "If they can't maintain a slow but steady amount of growth, they could get knocked out by rising sea levels in the coming years."
However, Romanó de Orte and Caldeira's research--with former Carnegie colleagues David Koweek (now at Ocean Visions), Yuichiro Takeshita (now at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute), and Rebecca Albright (now at the California Academy of Sciences)--showed that if researchers only make measurements to assess coral health during the daytime, it could lead to false sense of security.
Why?
Because dead coral is often colonized by algal communities that can also accumulate carbonate minerals during the day. However, most of these deposits dissolve overnight, so the carbonate minerals do not accumulate over time. In contrast, living corals, , which have evolved to build massive carbonate reefs visible from space, can continue to build their skeletons, albeit slowly, even at night.
"It's long been thought that measuring calcium carbonate production could be linked directly to the health of a coral community," Romanó de Orte said. "But our findings show that as algae increasingly succeed in overgrowing dead coral, it is going to be more difficult to rely on a once tried-and-true method for assessing whether a reef community is thriving."
To gain this critical understanding, the research team--which also included Tyler Cyronak of Nova Southeastern University, Alyssa Griffin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Kennedy Wolfe of the University of Queensland, and Alina Szmant and Robert Whitehead of University of North Carolina Wilmington--deployed specially designed, state-of-the-art incubator technology to closely monitor both coral and colonizing algae in an area of Australia's Great Barrier Reef that had been heavily damaged by two tropical cyclones in 2014 and 2015. They were able to monitor both calcification and dissolution of carbonate minerals, as well as the organisms' metabolic activity.
"This amazing tool allowed us to home in on the specific role that each organism has in an ecosystem's total output, which gives us new insights into how reefs are changing" Romanó de Orte explained.
INFORMATION:
Information on individuals' mobility--where they go as measured by their smartphones--has been used widely in devising and evaluating ways to respond to COVID-19, including how to target public health resources. Yet little attention has been paid to how reliable these data are and what sorts of demographic bias they possess. A new study tested the reliability and bias of widely used mobility data, finding that older and non-White voters are less likely to be captured by these data. Allocating public health resources based on such information could cause disproportionate harms to high-risk elderly and minority groups.
The study, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Stanford University, appears in the Proceedings of the ...
Oncotarget published "Genomic and neoantigen evolution from primary tumor to first metastases in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma" which reported that prior work has characterized changes in the mutation burden between primary and recurrent tumors; however, little work has characterized the changes in neoantigen evolution.
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(BOSTON) ¬-- Human cells typically transcribe half of their roughly 20,000 genes into RNA molecules at any given time. Just like with proteins, the function of those RNA species not only relies on their abundance but also their precise localization within the 3D space of each cell. Many RNA molecules convey gene information from the cell's nucleus to the protein-synthesizing machinery distributed throughout the cytoplasm (messenger RNAs or mRNAs), others are components of that machinery itself, while still different ones regulate genes and their expression, or have functions that remain to be discovered. Importantly, many diseases including cancer and neurological diseases have signatures that appear as changes in the abundance and distribution of RNAs.
To enable the analysis ...
DALLAS - March 17, 2021 - UT Southwestern researchers have identified the structure of a key member of a family of proteins called nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in three different shapes. The work, published online today in Cell, could eventually lead to new pharmaceutical treatments for a large range of diseases or infections including schizophrenia, lung cancer, and even COVID-19.
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BOSTON - There are several effective interventions to reduce the risk of suicide, the tenth-leading cause of death in the United States, but difficulties in identifying people at risk for suicide and concerns about the potentially high costs of suicide-prevention strategies have hampered their wider use.
But as researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) demonstrate, statistical suicide risk prevention models could be implemented cost-effectively in U.S. health care systems and might help save many lives each year.
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Increased global temperatures help invasive species establish themselves in ecosystems, new research led by a Swansea University bioscientist has shown.
The study, published by the Royal Society, gives an insight into the probable combined effects of species invasions, which are becoming more common, and global warming.
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An international team of 26 authors identified specific areas that, if protected, would safeguard over 80% of the habitats for endangered marine species, and increase fishing catches by more than eight million metric tons. The study is also the first to quantify the potential release of carbon dioxide into the ocean ...
One of the best ways to study human evolution is by comparing us with nonhuman species that, evolutionarily speaking, are closely related to us. That closeness can help scientists narrow down precisely what makes us human, but that scope is so narrow it can also be extremely hard to define. To address this complication, researchers from Stanford University have developed a new technique for comparing genetic differences.
Through two separate sets of experiments with this technique, the researchers discovered new genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees. They found a significant ...
