ArticleRoyal Society open science2021
Mesophotic coral communities escape thermal coral bleaching in French Polynesia.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Severe and widespread coral reef damage during the 2014-2017 Global Coral Bleaching Event.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Vulnerability of tropical fish communities across depth in the central Indian Ocean.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Limited Evidence for Depth Specialism in Isolated Seamount Reef Predators.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- First reference genomes for two mesophotic, reef-building coral species: Leptoseris cf. scabra and Montipora cf. grisea.The Journal of heredity · 2025Article
- Mesophotic reefs offer thermal refuge to the 2023 Caribbean mass bleaching event in the Cayman Islands.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The role of mesoscale-driven connectivity patterns in coral recovery around Moorea and Tahiti, French Polynesia.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Climate change impacts on mesophotic regions of the Great Barrier Reef.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Depth variation in benthic community response to repeated marine heatwaves on remote Central Indian Ocean reefs.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Mesophotic coral bleaching associated with changes in thermocline depth.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Viruses of a key coral symbiont exhibit temperature-driven productivity across a reefscape.ISME communications · 2023Article
- Hidden heatwaves and severe coral bleaching linked to mesoscale eddies and thermocline dynamics.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Shifts in predator behaviour following climate induced disturbance on coral reefs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Citizen-led expeditions can generate scientific knowledge and prospects for researchers.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Soft coral reproductive phenology along a depth gradient: Can "going deeper" provide a viable refuge?Ecology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Climate change and consequent coral bleaching are causing the disappearance of reef-building corals worldwide. While bleaching episodes significantly impact shallow waters, little is known about their impact on mesophotic coral communities. We studied the prevalence of coral bleaching two to three months after a heat stress event, along an extreme depth range from 6 to 90 m in French Polynesia. Bayesian modelling showed a decreasing probability of bleaching of all coral genera over depth, with little to no bleaching observed at lower mesophotic depths (greater than or equal to 60 m). We found that depth-generalist corals benefit more from increasing depth than depth-specialists (corals with a narrow depth range). Our data suggest that the reduced prevalence of bleaching with depth, especially from shallow to upper mesophotic depths (40 m), had a stronger relation with the light-irradiance attenuation than temperature. While acknowledging the geographical and temporal variability of the role of mesophotic reefs as spatial refuges during thermal stress, we ought to understand why coral bleaching reduces with depth. Future studies should consider repeated monitoring and detailed ecophysiological and environmental data. Our study demonstrated how increasing depth may offer a level of protection and that lower mesophotic communities could escape the impacts of a thermal bleaching event.
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