ArticleNature communications2020
Dynamic symbioses reveal pathways to coral survival through prolonged heatwaves.
Article in Nature communications, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed, 133 citations in OpenAlex.
- Stronger Together: Isograft Fusion Accelerates Recovery and May Facilitate Heat-Evolved Symbiont Transmission in Bleached Adult Corals.Environmental microbiology reports · 2026Article
- Persistent Legacy Effects of Marine Heatwaves on Coral Symbioses.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Severe and widespread coral reef damage during the 2014-2017 Global Coral Bleaching Event.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Symbiont Identity Impacts Prokaryotic Microbiome Dynamics During Heat Stress in a Model System for Corals.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Key coral symbiont lineages (family Symbiodiniaceae) are differentially associated with stony coral tissue loss disease.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Exploring phylosymbiosis in the skin microbiome of coral reef fish: synergistic effects of environmental and host-specific factors.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Algal Symbionts Indicate Heatwave Vulnerability in Corals From Hotspots but Not From Thermal Refugia.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Carbon pathways and trophic attributes are conserved in carnivorous reef fishes across a major human disturbance gradient.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Thermal responses and Symbiodiniaceae shuffling in a Red Sea foraminifer holobiont.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Global coral genomic vulnerability explains recent reef losses.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Unraveling the Fungal Community Dynamics in Heat-Tolerant CoralJournal of fungi (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Brine Shrimp Feeding Contributes to Fast Growth and Enhanced Immune Capacity of Reattached Polyps of Scleractinian CoralAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Marine Heatwaves Transform Coral Symbioses With Enduring Effects.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Specific host-algae relationship, yet flexible bacterial microbiome, in diatom-bearing foraminifera.Science advances · 2025Article
- Seasonal Variation in In Hospite but Not Free-Living, Symbiodiniaceae Communities Around Hainan Island, China.Microorganisms · 2025Article
- Coral thermotolerance retained following year-long exposure to a novel environment.Science advances · 2025Article
- The Influence of Symbiont Identity on the Proteomic and Metabolomic Responses of the Model Cnidarian Aiptasia to Thermal Stress.Environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Opportunities for Earth Observation to Inform Risk Management for Ocean Tipping Points.Surveys in geophysics · 2025Review
- Genetic clustering within massive Porites species complex is the primary driver of holobiont assembly.PloS one · 2025Article
- Unprecedented 2020 coral bleaching reveals unexpected taxa-specific responses in the central Red Sea.PloS one · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 6 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Prospects for coral persistence through increasingly frequent and extended heatwaves seem bleak. Coral recovery from bleaching is only known to occur after temperatures return to normal, and mitigation of local stressors does not appear to augment coral survival. Capitalizing on a natural experiment in the equatorial Pacific, we track individual coral colonies at sites spanning a gradient of local anthropogenic disturbance through a tropical heatwave of unprecedented duration. Unexpectedly, some corals survived the event by recovering from bleaching while still at elevated temperatures. These corals initially had heat-sensitive algal symbiont communities, endured bleaching, and then recovered through proliferation of heat-tolerant symbionts. This pathway to survival only occurred in the absence of strong local stressors. In contrast, corals in highly disturbed areas were already dominated by heat-tolerant symbionts, and despite initially resisting bleaching, these corals had no survival advantage in one species and 3.3 times lower survival in the other. These unanticipated connections between disturbance, coral symbioses and heat stress resilience reveal multiple pathways to coral survival through future prolonged heatwaves.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.