Coral-killing disturbances (cyclones, bleaching events, etc.) are commonplace on modern coral reefs.  Understanding why some reefs recover quickly whereas others do not is critical to understanding resilience. Following a series of severe disturbances to coral reefs in Moorea, French Polynesia, I used time-series data from the Moorea Coral Reef LTER to quantify demographic processes in corals (recruitment, survival, growth) and to identify mechanisms that determined rates of coral recovery. I showed that an early life-history bottleneck after recruitment determined the rate of coral recovery, and that this bottleneck was caused by predation by fishes (Speare et al. In Press, Ecology).  This work points to processes that affect the survival of corals shortly after settlement that determine the recovery rate of coral communities.

After disturbances, priority effects can give early-arriving species a competitive advantage over species that arrive later, but it is not well understood how top-down pressure by consumers (i.e., herbivores and predators) shape these dynamics.  Using a series of field experiments, we showed that priority effects and consumer pressure had context-dependenet effects on community trajectories after disturbances. When herbivory was low and macroalgae became established first, macroalgae became dominant and inhibited coral recruitment. However, when corals recruited first they suppressed macroalgae regardless of the strength of herbivory (Adam et al., 2021, Ecology). These results suggest that consumer pressure can have strong effects on community trajectories, but that the order of arrival of corals and macroalgae determine the effects of consumer pressure.