Under current climate warming predictions, the future of coral reefs is dire. With projected coral reef decline, it is likely that coral specimens for bleaching research will increasingly become a more limited resource in the future. By adopting a holistic approach through increased collaborations, coral bleaching scientists can maximize a specimen’s investigative yield, thus reducing the need to remove more coral material from the reef. Yet to expand a specimen’s utility for additional analytic methods, information on how corals are collected is essential as many methods are variably sensitive to upstream handling and processing. In an effort to identify common practices for coral collection, sacrifice, preservation, and processing in coral bleaching research, we surveyed the literature from the last 6.5 years and created and analyzed the resulting dataset of 171 publications. Since January 2014, at least 21,890 coral specimens were collected for bleaching surveys or bleaching experiments. These specimens spanned 122 species of scleractinian corals where the most frequently sampled were Acropora millepora, Pocillopora damicornis, and Stylophora pistillata. Almost 90% of studies removed fragments from the reef, 6% collected skeletal cores, and 3% collected mucus specimens. The most common methods for sacrificing specimens were snap freezing with liquid nitrogen, chemical preservation (e.g., with ethanol or nucleic acid stabilizing buffer), or airbrushing live fragments. We also characterized 37 distinct methodological pathways from collection to processing of specimens in preparation for a variety of physiological, -omic, microscopy, and imaging analyses. Interestingly, almost half of all studies used only one of six different pathways. These similarities in collection, preservation, and processing methods illustrate that archived coral specimens could be readily shared among researchers for additional analyses. In addition, our review provides a reference for future researchers who are considering which methodological pathway to select to maximize the utility of coral bleaching specimens that they collect.
Evolution Archives - Everything Airbrush, Harder And Steenbeck
Collecting whales: processes and biases in Nordic museum
Significantly enriched biological categories. Chart of the most
Overlap in downstream analyses conducted in coral bleaching
Degradation of Coral Reefs under Complex Impact of Natural and
Frontiers Understanding nitrogen dynamics in coral holobionts
Proportional change in adult abundance versus proportional change
Varit's Capstone Project Paper, PDF, Coral Reef
Perspective on the response of marine calcifiers to global warming
Collecting whales: processes and biases in Nordic museum
PDF) Coefficient of variation of sea surface temperature (SST) as
Saving Coral: Evolution in the Lab – Boston University News Service
PDF] Unified methods in collecting, preserving, and archiving
Emily SCHMELTZER, Biologist, Ph.D. Microbiology
Climate change is destroying our coral reefs. Here's how
