ArticleThe Journal of animal ecology2025
Mediterranean octocoral populations exposed to marine heatwaves are less resilient to disturbances.
Article in The Journal of animal ecology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 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
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Marine Heatwaves Overwhelm the Buffering Benefits of Marine Protected Areas: Two Decades of Collapse in a Mediterranean Gorgonian.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Beyond biodiversity: the role of Paramuricea clavata forests in shaping taxonomic and functional diversity.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Heatwave-driven persistent microbes threaten the resilience of Mediterranean coral holobionts.Environmental microbiome · 2025Article
- Mediterranean octocoral populations exposed to marine heatwaves are less resilient to disturbances.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The effects of climate change are now more pervasive than ever. Marine ecosystems have been particularly impacted by climate change, with marine heatwaves (MHWs) being a strong driver of mass mortality events. Even in the most optimistic greenhouse gas emission scenarios, MHWs will continue to increase in frequency, intensity and duration. For this reason, understanding the resilience of marine species to the increase of MHWs is crucial to predicting their viability under future climatic conditions. In this study, we explored the consequences of MHWs on the resilience (the ability of a population to resist and recover after a disturbance) of a Mediterranean key octocoral species, Paramuricea clavata, to further disturbances to their population structure. To quantify P. clavata's capacity to resist and recover from future disturbances, we used demographic information collected from 1999 to 2022, from two different sites in the NW Mediterranean Sea to calculate the transient dynamics of their populations. Our results showed that the differences in the dynamics of populations exposed and those not exposed to MHWs were driven mostly by differences in mean survivorship and growth. We also showed that after MHWs P. clavata populations had lower resistance and slower rates of recovery than those not exposed to MHWs. Populations exposed to MHWs had lower resistance elasticity to most demographic processes compared to unexposed populations. In contrast, the only demographic process showing some differences when comparing the speed of recovery elasticity values between populations exposed and unexposed to MHWs was stasis. Finally, under scenarios of increasing frequency of MHWs, the extinction of P. clavata populations will accelerate and their capacity to resist and recover after further disturbances will be hampered. Overall, these findings confirm that future climatic conditions will make octocoral populations even more vulnerable to further disturbances. These results highlight the importance of limiting local impacts on marine ecosystems to dampen the consequences of climate change.
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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.