A review on the acclimatization mechanism and possibility for adaptation of reef-building corals to environmental changes

Abstract

Many attentions have been paid to the decrease of reef-building corals, which are main composers in coral reef ecosystem, by environmental changes at global and local scales. It is an urgent issue to evaluate how corals cope with future environmental changes. There are many laboratory experiments which have evaluated the coral responses to environmental changes by focusing on some parameters (e.g., growth rate, mortality, photo synthetic activity), and several reviews have been also published. However, the review focusing on how corals could acclimatize to several levels of environmental changes is limited. In addition, the possibility whether corals could adapt to environmental changes through the change of genetic composition within a population has been rarely focused. In this review, we summarize basic knowledge on the acclimatization mechanism of corals to environmental changes (temperature, ocean acidity, nutrient, light intensity, etc), the possibility of adaptation, and discuss future direction of this research area.