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Competition Among Sessile Organisms on Coral Reefs

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Coral Reefs: An Ecosystem in Transition

Abstract

Competition among sessile organisms is a major process on coral reefs, and is becoming more important as anthropogenic disturbances cause shifts in dominance to non-reef builders such as macroalgae, soft corals, ascidians, and corallimorpharians. Long-term monitoring and field experiments have demonstrated that competition for limited space can exert major impacts on reef biodiversity and community composition across habitats and regions. Recent experiments also reveal increasingly important roles of allelopathic chemicals and the alteration of associated microbes in shaping competitive outcomes among benthic space occupiers. Competition impacts the recruitment, growth, and mortality of sessile reef organisms and alters their population dynamics. Co-settlement and aggregation of conspecific coral colonies may lead to intense intraspecific competition, including chimera formation and potential somatic and germ cell parasitism. The complexity of competitive outcomes and their alteration by a wide variety of factors, including irradiance, water motion, and nutrient levels, results in mostly circular networks of interaction, often enhancing species diversity on coral reefs. Competition is a model process for revealing impacts of human activities on coral reefs, and will become increasingly important as alternate dominants gain space at the expense of reef-building corals.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Zvy Dubinsky for inviting us to write this review. The manuscript was improved by comments from J. Bruno, A. Norstrom, and J. Szczebak. We dedicate this review to J. Lang and E. Chornesky, pioneering researchers on coral competition who inspired NEC to spend a lifetime investigating the complexity of interactions among cnidarians on coral reefs, and to T. Morrow and A. Morrow for their support of K. M. Morrow in her pursuit of a career in coral reef biology. Financial support was provided by grants from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to NEC for past and current fieldwork on coral reefs, and by a NOAA Nancy Foster Scholarship to KMM. This is contribution #65 of the Auburn University Marine Biology Program.

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  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Auburn University, 101 Rouse Life Sciences Building, Auburn, AL, 36849, USA

    Nanette E. Chadwick & Kathleen M. Morrow

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  1. Nanette E. Chadwick
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Correspondence to Nanette E. Chadwick .

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  1. , The Mina & Everard Goodman Fac. of Life, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900, Israel

    Zvy Dubinsky

  2. , The Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900, Israel

    Noga Stambler

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Chadwick, N.E., Morrow, K.M. (2011). Competition Among Sessile Organisms on Coral Reefs. In: Dubinsky, Z., Stambler, N. (eds) Coral Reefs: An Ecosystem in Transition. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0114-4_20

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