Sexual recruitment allows corals to maintain their populations through time, reach new habitats, and repopulate areas after an environmental or anthropogenic disturbance. This study aimed to estimate spatiotemporal variation of sexual recruitment along two areas of the southwestern coast of the Gulf of California (Bahía de La Paz and Bahía de Loreto) considered to be suboptimal for coral development (strong seasonality and variability of sea-surface temperature, incidence of hurricanes, turbidity and nutrient concentration, and low Ωar). Recruitment data were compared to sea-surface temperatures and with recruitment data from other sites in the eastern Pacific that have less-stressful environments. Terracotta tiles were used as collectors of larval coral propagules; tiles were immersed for 3-month periods between August 2004 and September 2005. Higher recruitment was found during the warm season, and coral recruits were found at almost all sites, including a vessel grounding area. Recruitment wa...

The high diversity and biomass of organisms associated with coral communities depend directly on the maintenance or changes in the benthic composition. Over a decade, we evaluated the spatiotemporal variation in the benthic structure and composition of an insular coral community in the Northeastern Tropical Pacific. Our results show that local conditions drive spatiotemporal differences, and benthic organisms such as sponges, crustose coralline algae, octocorals, and hydrocorals all increased in abundance (cover) in response to negative thermal anomalies caused by the 2010–2011 La Niña event. In contrast, abnormally high temperatures, such as those recorded during the 2015–2016 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event, explain the loss of scleractinian corals and crustose coralline algae coverage, which reduced the benthic groups’ richness (BGR), diversity (H’_BG), and evenness (J’_BG), with evidence of a consequent decrease in ecosystem function recorded the following year. Our analysis also showed that sites with high habitat heterogeneity harbored higher average BRG and H’_BG values and were less affected by environmental fluctuations than sites with high live scleractinian coral cover and lower BRG and H’_BG values. Therefore, the benthic structure was impacted differently by the same perturbation, and changes in the benthic community composition affected the groups associated with the community and ecological functions. More importantly, regional stressors such as the ENSO event caused only temporary changes in the benthic community structure, demonstrating the high resilience of the community to annual and interannual stressors.

The density banding patterns of the skeletons of massive reef-building corals can be used as historical records of their growth, life history, and environmental conditions. By analyzing these patterns, it is possible to estimate growth parameters such as skeletal density, extension rate, and calcification rate. The responses of stony corals to environmental stress depend on the amount of energy available for high-energetic metabolic processes, including skeletal calcification and sexual reproduction. The sex of a colony may also influence its calcification rate and resistance to environmental stressors like thermal anomalies. Here, we review and summarize the literature that focuses on sex-associated differences in coral calcification rates between male and female colonies and then we examine their differential responses to changes in sea surface temperature (SST) in Porites panamensis, P. lobata, Pavona gigantea, Siderastrea siderea, Montastraea cavernosa, Dichocoenia stokesi, and Dengrogyra cylindrus from the eastern Pacific and Caribbean regions through a reanalysis of published data. Differences in the calcification rates between sexes were due to the energy available for calcification and the strategy employed for skeletal growth. Female corals exhibited lower calcification rates than male colonies in all coral species. The results reveal that overall, the calcification rate was negatively related to SST when the data of both sexes were pooled. However, when data were analyzed separately by sex, only the calcification rate of females was significantly dependent on SST. These findings highlight the implications for paleoenvironmental reconstructions using coral skeletons and the potential disparities in the populations of gonochoric corals.