Predicting demography from species traits: larval development time and its sensitivity to warming depend on egg size in corals
Figueiredo, Joana, Baird, Andrew H., Harii, Saki, and Connolly, Sean R. (2025) Predicting demography from species traits: larval development time and its sensitivity to warming depend on egg size in corals. Coral Reefs, 45. pp. 81-91.
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Abstract
In the absence of demographic data, readily measurable life history traits, like egg size, can be used to predict how demographic rates vary across species, facilitating modeling and analysis of high-diversity assemblages. We assessed the larval survival and competency acquisition dynamics, both determinants of larval dispersal, of four previously unstudied coral species at current and warmed temperatures. This dataset was combined with comparable data for three other coral species to assess how well egg size predicts larval mortality, the minimum time to competency and their sensitivity to warming. Minimum time to competency increased with egg size; moreover, warming-induced reductions in time to competency were greater for species with larger eggs. In contrast, mortality rate and its response to warming were both independent of egg size. These findings show how assemblage-level responses to environmental change can be inferred for diverse communities and indicate how warming-induced changes in larval biology may reshape reef coral metacommunities.
| Item ID: | 88583 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1432-0975 |
| Keywords: | Acropora digitifera, Acropora tenuis, Broadcast spawners, Climate change, Ctenactis echinata, Larval competency, Lobophyllia corymbosa, Meta-analysis, Trait-based ecology |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, 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 you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. 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. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. |
| Funders: | Australian Research Council (ARC) |
| Projects and Grants: | ARC DP110101168, ARC DP11010116, ARC DP0880544 |
| Date Deposited: | 13 May 2026 01:02 |
| 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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