Evaluating the potential of antagonists for assisting corals to cope with ocean warming (ANTAGONIST)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Wild
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions ; Oceanography
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 547342891

Reefs generated by corals are among the most diverse, productive, and precious ecosystems on Earth. Currently, the simultaneous occurrence of a range of global and local factors often leads to rapid degradation of these ecosystems. Particularly, the global factor ocean warming damages reefs since many reef-building corals bleach in response to high water temperatures. Following bleaching, corals often die because during bleaching they are in a very vulnerable state. Thus, temperature-induced bleaching, ultimately caused by climate change, is certainly the most deleterious factor for coral reefs as the frequency of bleaching events has increased in the last decades. Thus, the mitigation of climate change is probably the biggest global challenge that we currently face. It will very likely take some more decades until climate change is mitigated or, in the best case, reversed via international agreements. In the meantime, we are losing coral reef ecosystems at rapid velocity. Therefore, better knowledge about measures that may increase the resilience of hard corals to bleaching are urgently needed. This proposal aims to fill this important knowledge gap by the experimental investigation of interaction results between the hardly manageable global factor ocean warming and a range of much better manageable, more local, factors. The idea of this proposal is based on the observation that not all interactions between global and local factors are additive or synergistic, but in some cases antagonistic, i.e. the local factor mitigates the global factor in its result. In a series of interconnected and comparative laboratory experiments, we now want to test the effect of a range of potential (based on literature findings) antagonist candidates that locally occur in coral reefs (including macro and micronutrients such as ammonium, phosphate, dissolved organic carbon, manganese, and iron) on the physiology of common hard and soft corals at high water temperatures. We envision an interconnected series of laboratory and field measurements to achieve these objectives. This project has the potential to essentially increase our knowledge on interaction effects between global and local factors on corals. This knowledge can be used by reef managers and decision makers to better protect coral reefs against the non-manageable ocean warming by applying management measures that includes the modification of sewage treatment. This may ultimately buy time for coral reefs – time that is likely needed until effective climate protection plans are implemented.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants