A physiological crisis drives the coral recruitment bottleneck

Recruitment failure is a leading cause of population decline for tropical corals. Because the causes of death for small corals are unclear, it is challenging to predict how recruitment bottlenecks will change in the future. We tested the hypothesis that depletion of biomass causes high mortality of small corals under thermal stress. The biomass of small colonies (< 30 mm diameter) of genetically identified broadcast spawning Pocillopora from Moorea, French Polynesia, was manipulated using elevated temperature to increase respiration, and reduced day length to decrease photosynthesis. Corals with high or low biomass were incubated at ambient summer (28°C) and elevated (31°C) temperatures. Small P. meandrina with high biomass were six times more likely to die at 31°C versus 28°C, but corals with low biomass were 48 times more likely to die at 31°C versus 28°C. When small Pocillopora were grown in seawater augmented with bicarbonate to reduce the energetic expenditure on skeletogenesis,..., , # A physiological crisis drives the coral recruitment bottleneck

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.4tmpg4fnx](10.5061/dryad.4tmpg4fnx)

## Description of the data and file structure

These data come from experiments completed in 2024 in which the first experiment used incubations in tanks to alter the biomass of corals and then exposed them in tanks to temperature treatments to test the effects of biomass manipulation. In the second experiment corals were grown in tanks in which bicarbonate concentrations were manipulated and growth and respiration were recorded. 

README: A physiological crisis drives the coral recruitment bottleneck

This submission includes 17 files that contains all the data published in the paper

**1_Coral_sizes:** These data describe the size of the corals used in the survivorship experiment

• Coral # = unique ID

• Diameter = planar diameter of corals (mm)

• Used for = how the corals were used in the experiment

**2_Phase_1_tank_conditions_temperature:** These data...,