Data from: The genomics of recovery from coral bleaching

Ecological damage from periodic environmental extremes is often repaired
in resilient ecosystems, but the rate of return to a non-damaged state is
critical. Measures of recovery of communities include biomass,
productivity and diversity, while measures of recovery of individuals tend
to focus on physiological conditions and the return to normal metabolic
functioning. Transcriptomics offers a window into the entire physiology of
the organism under stress and can represent a holistic view of organismal
recovery. In this study, we track the recovery of seven colonies of
Acropora hyacinthus following a natural bleaching event. We identified a
large environmental stress response in the field that involved
approximately 20% of the host transcriptome. The transcriptome remained
largely perturbed for at least six months after temperatures had cooled
and four months after symbiont populations had recovered. Moreover, a
small set of genes did not recover to previous expression levels even 12
months after the event, about the time that normal growth rates resumed.
This study is among the first to incorporate transcriptomics into a
longitudinal dataset of recovery from environmental stress. The data
demonstrate large and lasting effects on coral physiology long after
environmental conditions return to normal and symbiont populations
recover.