Benchmarks in organism performance and their use in comparative analyses

Area of Science:

• Marine Biology
• Ecology
• Physiology

Background:

• Assessing organismal responses to stress requires functional benchmarks, which are often unavailable for many taxa.
• Coral reefs face significant environmental challenges, making functional benchmarks crucial for understanding stress impacts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compile data on scleractinian corals to establish a reference for gauging stress responses.
• To evaluate the capacity of available data to support synthetic analyses by testing depth and family contrasts.
• To identify limitations in existing data for establishing functional benchmarks and conducting comparative stressor analyses.

Main Methods:

• Compiled data from 126 papers on 37 genera and 73 species of scleractinian corals, describing 13 traits.
• Analyzed trait data independently and by depth to assess depth- and family-level effects.
• Utilized Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) models to predict holobiont carbon ratios and respiration.

Main Results:

• Data sparsity limited the detection of depth- and family-level effects.
• A trend of declining dark respiration and increasing calcification with depth was observed.
• Significant limitations were found in the available literature for synthetic analyses and establishing functional benchmarks.

Conclusions:

• Existing literature on scleractinian corals has limitations for synthetic analyses and establishing functional benchmarks.
• Differences in measurement environments may contribute to observed data variability.
• Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) models offer a promising approach to overcome data limitations for comparative stressor response analyses across taxa.