ArticleBiology letters2020
Partitioning colony size variation into growth and partial mortality.
Article in Biology letters, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Nutritional and Microbial Responses of Pocillopora verrucosa to Co-Culture With Chromis viridis Damselfish.Environmental microbiology reports · 2026Article
- A physiological crisis drives the coral recruitment bottleneck.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Unprecedented 2020 coral bleaching reveals unexpected taxa-specific responses in the central Red Sea.PloS one · 2025Article
- Coral geometry and why it matters.PeerJ · 2024Article
- Coral assemblages at higher latitudes favor short-term potential over long-term performance.Ecology · 2023Article
- Scaling up calcification, respiration, and photosynthesis rates of six prominent coral taxa.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Body size is a trait that broadly influences the demography and ecology of organisms. In unitary organisms, body size tends to increase with age. In modular organisms, body size can either increase or decrease with age, with size changes being the net difference between modules added through growth and modules lost through partial mortality. Rates of colony extension are independent of body size, but net growth is allometric, suggesting a significant role of size-dependent mortality. In this study, we develop a generalizable model of partitioned growth and partial mortality and apply it to data from 11 species of reef-building coral. We show that corals generally grow at constant radial increments that are size independent, and that partial mortality acts more strongly on small colonies. We also show a clear life-history trade-off between growth and partial mortality that is governed by growth form. This decomposition of net growth can provide mechanistic insights into the relative demographic effects of the intrinsic factors (e.g. acquisition of food and life-history strategy), which tend to affect growth, and extrinsic factors (e.g. physical damage, and predation), which tend to affect mortality.
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Registered trials
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