A diversity of human-assisted approaches to rehabilitate and boost coral health have been suggested and investigated throughout the past years. Vitamins and trace-metal supplementation is a well-known strategy in human medicine and aquaculture, but vitamin addition is not currently actively tested for coral growth and recovery. These molecules are essential cofactors that have been correlated with coral thermal resistance and upregulated in corals treated with beneficial microorganisms (i.e., probiotics). To assess the effects of B12, B6 and zinc supplementation on coral health, we conducted a 2-month experiment in an open-closed-loop system mesocosm joined to a peristaltic pump continuously dosing the vitamins and/or zinc to individual 250 L tanks. Fragments of five different colonies of Acropora hemprichii were randomly distributed into the respective treatment tanks (B12, B6, zinc, multi-treatment and control). After 21 days, the corals were exposed to a pulse (1 day) of thermal stress, followed by three weeks of recovery. Substantial mortality (55%) in the control treatment was observed during the stress and recovery, with B12, B6, zinc and multi treatments exhibiting significantly less mortality (<20%). Coral health data combined with analysis of microbiome and metabolomic approaches suggest that both vitamins and zinc have a positive effect on coral health recovery. This study is the first to provide evidence that complex B-vitamins accompanied by zinc supplementation, can be a valuable tool for coral reef rehabilitation, and paves the way to further understanding specific mechanisms by which these nutrients promote coral health will be needed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:kaust.edu.sa/oai:repository.kaust.edu.sa:10754/692775 |
| Date | 07 1900 |
| Creators | Beenham, Laura |
| Contributors | Peixoto, Raquel S, Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering (BESE) Division, Jaremko, Lukasz, Berumen, Michael L. |
| Source Sets | King Abdullah University of Science and Technology |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | 2024-07-04, At the time of archiving, the student author of this thesis opted to temporarily restrict access to it. The full text of this thesis will become available to the public after the expiration of the embargo on 2024-07-04. |
| Relation | N/A, N |
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