Abstract
Kushimoto, the southernmost part of Honshu, Japan is strongly influenced by the Kuroshio Warm Current, where hermatypic corals are abundant in spite of its high latitude location of 33°N. Kushimoto has been known as a habitat of tabular-type Acropora coral communities in Honshu for a long time, and this characteristic has been continued essentially without dramatic change until recently. The change of the coral communities in both quantity and quality has been gradually recognized since the middle of the 1990s. The quantitative change consists of reduction of coverage from a peak in 2000 with the state of low coverage continuing for the last five years. The qualitative change includes increased species diversity by recruits of many tropical coral species that were not previously recorded in Kushimoto, and replacement of dominant species by the newcomers. It is suggested that these changes of coral communities were caused by a warm water temperature phenomenon that has continued since the 1990s.
