Evidence for microbially-mediated tradeoffs between growth and defense throughout coral evolution
Epstein, Hannah E., Brown, Tanya, Akinrinade, Ayọmikun O., McMinds, Ryan, Pollock, F. Joseph, Sonett, Dylan, Smith, Styles, Bourne, David G., Carpenter, Carolina S., Knight, Rob, Willis, Bette L., Medina, Monica, Lamb, Joleah B., Thurber, Rebecca Vega, and Zaneveld, Jesse R. (2025) Evidence for microbially-mediated tradeoffs between growth and defense throughout coral evolution. Animal Microbiome, 7 (1). 1.
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Abstract
Background: Evolutionary tradeoffs between life-history strategies are important in animal evolution. Because microbes can influence multiple aspects of host physiology, including growth rate and susceptibility to disease or stress, changes in animal-microbial symbioses have the potential to mediate life-history tradeoffs. Scleractinian corals provide a biodiverse, data-rich, and ecologically-relevant host system to explore this idea. Results: Using a comparative approach, we tested if coral microbiomes correlate with disease susceptibility across 425 million years of coral evolution by conducting a cross-species coral microbiome survey (the “Global Coral Microbiome Project”) and combining the results with long-term global disease prevalence and coral trait data. Interpreting these data in their phylogenetic context, we show that microbial dominance predicts disease susceptibility, and traced this dominance-disease association to a single putatively beneficial symbiont genus, Endozoicomonas. Endozoicomonas relative abundance in coral tissue explained 30% of variation in disease susceptibility and 60% of variation in microbiome dominance across 40 coral genera, while also correlating strongly with high growth rates. Conclusions: These results demonstrate that the evolution of Endozoicomonas symbiosis in corals correlates with both disease prevalence and growth rate, and suggest a mediating role. Exploration of the mechanistic basis for these findings will be important for our understanding of how microbial symbioses influence animal life-history tradeoffs.
| Item ID: | 87755 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 2524-4671 |
| Keywords: | Coral disease, Coral microbiome, Coral reefs, Evolution, Evolutionary tradeoffs |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. |
| Date Deposited: | 13 Feb 2026 01:30 |
| FoR Codes: | 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310305 Marine and estuarine ecology (incl. marine ichthyology) @ 100% |
| SEO Codes: | 18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1805 Marine systems and management > 180504 Marine biodiversity @ 100% |
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