Matheus A Mello-Athayde

University of Queensland | UQ · School of Biological Sciences

Back‐to‐back marine heatwaves in 2016 and 2017 resulted in severe coral bleaching and mortality across the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Encouragingly, some corals that survived these events exhibit increased bleaching resistance and may represent thermally tolerant populations that can better cope with ocean warming. Using the GBR as a natural laborat...

Ocean acidification is a growing threat to coral growth and the accretion of coral reef ecosystems. Corals inhabiting environments that already endure extreme diel pCO2 fluctuations, however, may represent acidification-resilient populations capable of persisting on future reefs. Here, we examined the impact of pCO2 variability on the reef-building...

Coral reefs are facing increasingly devasting impacts from ocean warming and acidification due to anthropogenic climate change. In addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, potential solutions have focused either on reducing light stress during heating, or on the potential for identifying or engineering “super corals”. A large subset of these...

Heat stress is an environmental factor that regularly challenges the well-being of living organisms. This study aims to examine the physiological changes happening in two reef-building coral species exposed to thermal stress under various light conditions. The two ecologically relevant heatwave scenarios were applied under ambient lights (high irra...

The bioeroding sponge Cliona orientalis is photosymbiotic with dinoflagellates of the genus Symbiodinium and is pervasive on the Great Barrier Reef. We investigated how C. orientalis responded to past and future ocean conditions in a simulated community setting. The experiment lasted over an Austral summer under four carbon dioxide emission scenari...

Recent research efforts have demonstrated increased bioerosion rates under experimentally elevated partial pressures of seawater carbon dioxide (pCO2 ) with or without increased temperatures, which may lead to net erosion on coral reefs in the future. However, this conclusion clearly depends on the ability of the investigated bioeroding organisms t...

The combination of ocean warming and acidification as a result of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is considered to be a significant threat to calcifying organisms and their activities on coral reefs. How these global changes impact the important roles of decalcifying organisms (bioeroders) in the regulation of carbonate budgets, howeve...