Tullia Isotta Terraneo

• Phd
• Researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Fluorescence is a notable adaptation in marine environments, helping to counteract the loss of longer wavelengths as light diminishes with depth. Studied to some extent in cnidarians and reef fish, its presence and functions in crustaceans are less understood. Recently, fluorescence was discovered in gall crabs (Cryptochiridae). To investigate the...

Deep-sea coral frameworks are understudied in the Red Sea, where conditions in the deep are conspicuously warm and saline compared to other basins. Habitat suitability models can be used to predict the distribution pattern of species or assemblages where direct observation is difficult. Here we show how coral frameworks, built by species within the...

Reef-building corals live in close mutualism with dinoflagellate algae (family Symbiodiniaceae), which play key roles in coral physiological performance and survival. Association patterns between host species and endosymbiont algae and their significance are still not fully understood, but they seem to affect the ability of hosts to inhabit differe...

Crustaceans are one of the most widespread and speciose groups of marine organisms, fulfilling multiple ecological roles in numerous ecosystems. On coral reefs, many crustacean species form associations with scleractinian corals. Although the Red Sea is considered a biodiversity hotspot, few studies examined the diversity of coral-associated crusta...

The ecological success of shallow water corals hinges on their association with photosynthetic Symbiodiniaceae algae. This is affected by environmental drivers among which sea temperature is pivotal. In 2016, a prolonged heat wave challenged New Caledonia reefs triggering a severe bleaching event. Here, we tracked 72 coral colonies comprising two s...

Black corals (Hexacorallia: Antipatharia) are a major component of mesophotic and deep marine ecosystems. Due to their preference for light deprived environments, black corals have historically been considered azooxanthellate, yet recent works have found them in association with dinoflagellates of the family Symbiodiniaceae down to 396 m depth. Whi...

Black corals occur as part of benthic assemblages from shallow to deep waters in all oceans. Despite the importance in many benthic ecosystems, where these act as biodiversity aggregators, antipatharians remain poorly studied, with 75% of the known species occurring below recreational SCUBA diving depth limits. Currently, information regarding the...

Coral-dwelling gall crabs (Cryptochiridae) live in an obligate symbiosis with reef-building corals from shallow to deep waters. In particular, crabs of the genus Opecarcinus are known to occur across the tropical belt in association with the scleractinian family Agariciidae, down to a depth of 89 m. The Red Sea is a semi-enclosed basin that has lon...

Introduction The Red Sea is a narrow rift basin characterized by latitudinal environmental gradients which shape the diversity and distribution of reef-dwelling organisms. Studies on Symbiodiniaceae associated with select hard coral taxa present species- specific assemblages and concordant variation patterns from the North to southeast Red Sea coas...

Octocorals (Cnidaria: Anthozoa) have a global distribution and form benthic assemblages along the depth gradient, from shallow to deep waters. They often occur below SCUBA diving limits, where they can become dominant habitat builders and aggregate different taxa. During a cruise in February 2023, one octocoral specimen was collected at 1453 m dept...

The acrothoracican genus Berndtia Utinomi, 1950 includes small barnacles known to bore into the calcareous skeleton of living scleractinian corals of the genera Psammocora Dana, 1846 and Leptastrea Milne Edwards & Haime, 1849. The six known species of Berndtia are restricted to the tropical Western Pacific. We provide the first record of Berndtia f...

The diversity and evolution of the Red Sea invertebrates in mesophotic and deep-water benthic ecosystems remain largely unexplored. The Palaemonidae is a diversified family of caridean shrimps with numerous taxa in need of taxonomic revisions based on recent molecular analyses. The Red Sea mesophotic and bathyal palaemonid shrimps are largely unstu...

During two scientific expeditions between 2020 and 2022, direct surveys led to the discovery of free-living mesophotic foraminiferal-algal nodules along the coast of the NEOM region (northern Saudi Arabian Red Sea) where they form an unexpected benthic ecosystem in mesophotic water depths on the continental shelf. Being mostly spheroidal, the nodul...

Coral-dwelling gall crabs (Cryptochiridae) are obligate symbionts of stony corals and occur on shallow and deep reefs across the tropical belt. The circumtropical genus Opecarcinus associates with Agariciidae corals, a dominant component of Mesophotic Coral Ecosystems (MCEs). Here, we report the first Red Sea mesophotic record, with 89 m as the dee...

Coral reefs accommodate a myriad of species, many of which live in association with a host organism. Decapod crustaceans make up a large part of this associated fauna on coral reefs. Among these, cryptochirid crabs are obligately associated with scleractinian corals, in which they create dwellings where they permanently reside. These gall crabs sho...

Introduction The northern Red Sea has been coined a refuge for reef corals due to the exceptional thermal tolerance of these organisms. With ocean warming threatening coral reefs worldwide, a panoptic characterization of corals living in extreme conditions may provide insights into future responses of corals to environmental change. Among other fac...

The family Euphylliidae consists of reef-building zooxanthellate scleractinian corals distributed across the Indo-Pacific. Seven extant genera comprising a total of 22 valid species are currently recognised. Recent studies have re-organised the taxonomy of the family at the genus level based on molecular and morphological data, including a comprehe...

Understanding species-specific resource requirements is paramount in managing and protecting biodiversity in a world where environmental quality is in decline. Dietary data can inform predator–prey relationships and how changes in prey availability impact different species. However, for many coral reef fishes, prey and predatory events can be diffi...

A black coral, Bathypathes thermophila Chimienti, sp. nov. is described from the Saudi Arabian coasts of the Gulf of Aqaba and north Red Sea (Neom area) using an integrated taxonomic approach. The morphological distinctiveness of the new species is confirmed by molecular analyses. The species thrives in warm and high salinity waters typical of the...

Coral reefs are in global decline and anomalously hot temperatures shoulder the blame. Foraminferal bioindicators are important because they record historical reef stress over periods of centuries to millennia, as compared to the few decades offered by diver surveys. For a region lacking systematic long-term reef monitoring programs, the use of bio...

Mitochondrial genomes (mtgenome) represent an important source of information for addressing fundamental evolutionary, phylogeographic, systematic, and ecological questions in marine organisms. In the last two decades the advent of high-throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS) has provided an unprecedented possibility to access large amount of g...

The scleractinian coral family Dendrophylliidae is a major component of shallow and deep-water coral ecosystems worldwide, but our knowledge on the evolutionary history of the family remains scarce. Here, we used ezRAD coupled with Illumina sequencing technology and reconstructed the complete mitochondrial genome of Dendrophyllia minuscula (GenBank...

The Stylasteridae, commonly known as lace corals, is a family of colonial calcifying hydrozoans mostly inhabiting deep waters. Stylasterids show a cosmopolitan distribution but, in some areas, they are characterized by low species diversity, such as in the Red Sea, where only a shallow-water species has been reported so far. With this work, we prov...

Sesoko Station, Okinawa, has been the site of many significant advances in coral reproductive research and it continues to be a preferred destination for both Japanese and international researchers. Consequently, there are decades of spawning observations, which we present and explore here with the aim of making it easier to predict when species sp...

The advent of high throughput sequencing technologies provides an opportunity to resolve phylogenetic relationships among closely related species. By incorporating hundreds to thousands of unlinked loci and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), phylogenomic analyses have a far greater potential to resolve species boundaries than approaches that r...

Modern systematics integrating molecular and morphological data has greatly improved our understanding of coral evolutionary relationships during the last two decades and led to a deeply revised taxonomy of the order Scleractinia. The family Merulinidae (Cnidaria: Scleractinia) was recently subjected to a series of revisions following this integrat...

The discovery of multi-species synchronous spawning of scleractinian corals on the Great Barrier Reef in the 1980s stimulated an extraordinary effort to document spawning times in other parts of the globe. Unfortunately, most of these data remain unpublished which limits our understanding of regional and global reproductive patterns. The Coral Spaw...

Supplementary information about the specimens used in this research, including location of voucher specimens and link to field photographs on Dryad: https://datadryad.org/stash/share/5atVNHU8tBYO3dsNkqqIOlQvlpg-xbd4XsyEV-5G9Sw

Accurate delimitation of species and their relationships is a fundamental issue in evolutionary biology and taxonomy and provides essential implications for conservation management. Scleractinian corals are difficult to identify because of their ecophenotypic and geographic variation and their morphological plasticity. Furthermore, phylogenies base...

Stony corals (Scleractinia) form the basis for some of the most diverse ecosytems on Earth, but we have much to learn about their evolutionary history and systematic relationships. In order to improve our understanding of species in corals we here investigated phylogenetic relationships between morphologically defined species and genetic lineages i...

Two new reef coral species, Porites farasani sp. nov. and Porites hadramauti sp. nov. (Scleractinia, Poritidae), are described from the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Porites farasani sp. nov. only occurs in the Farasan Islands in the southern Red Sea, while P. hadramauti sp. nov. has been collected in the Yemen Hadramaut region in the Gulf of Aden....

Aim The aim of the study was to assess the diversity of algal symbionts of the family Symbiodiniaceae associated with the coral genus Porites in the Red Sea, and to test for host‐specificity and environmental variables driving biogeographical patterns of algal symbiont distribution. Location Saudi Arabian Red Sea. Taxon Endosymbiotic dinoflage...

The biodiversity of Red Sea corals captured the attention of some of the earliest European natural historians. Many of the first descriptions of tropical reef corals were based on Red Sea material. Modern approaches to resolve the notorious challenges of coral taxonomy have only recently been applied to Red Sea taxa. This chapter reviews current kn...

Fire corals of the hydrocoral genus Millepora provide an important ecological role as framework builders of coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific and the Atlantic. Recent works have demonstrated the incongruence between molecular data and the traditional taxonomy of Millepora spp. based on overall skeleton growth form and pores. In an attempt to establis...

Extant biodiversity can easily be underestimated owing to the presence of cryptic taxa, even among commonly observed species. Scleractinian corals are challenging to identify because of their ecophenotypic variation and morphological plasticity. In addition, molecular analyses have revealed the occurrence of cryptic speciation. Here, we describe a...

In this study, we sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome of Porites harrisoni using ezRAD and Illumina technology. Genome length consisted of 18,630 bp, with a base composition of 25.92% A, 13.28% T, 23.06% G, and 37.73% C. Consistent with other hard corals, P. harrisoni mitogenome was arranged in 13 protein-coding genes, 2 rRNA, and 2 tRNA ge...

Corals in the genus Porites are among the major framework builders of reef structures worldwide, yet the genus has been challenging to study due to a lack of informative molecular markers. Here, we used ezRAD sequencing to reconstruct the complete mitochondrial genome of Porites fontanesii (GenBank accession number MG754069), a widespread coral spe...

Scleractinian corals ascribed to the family Agariciidae represent an important component of Red Sea coral reef fauna but little genetic data is currently available for this group, and the existing information shows polyphyly in the examined mesophotic taxa from the Pacific Ocean. In this work, we provide a first genetic survey of Agariciidae from t...

The scleractinian coral Cyphastrea is a common and widespread genus throughout the coral reefs of the Indo-Pacific. Little is known about the phylogenetic relationships within this taxon and species identification is based mainly on traditional skeletal characters, such as the number of septa, septa cycles, growth form and corallite dimensions. Her...

Reticulate evolution, introgressive hybridisation, and phenotypic plasticity have been documented in scleractinian corals and have challenged our ability to interpret speciation processes. Stylophora is a key model system in coral biology and physiology, but genetic analyses have revealed that cryptic lineages concealed by morphological stasis exis...

The scleractinian family Lobophylliidae is undergoing a major taxonomic revision thanks to the combination of molecular and morphological data. In this study, we investigate the evolutionary relationships and the macro-and micromorphology of six nominal coral species belonging to two of the nine molecular clades of the Lobophylliidae, clades A and...

Layang-Layang is a small island part of an oceanic atoll in the Spratly Islands off Sabah, Malaysia. As the reef coral fauna in this part of the South China Sea is poorly known, a survey was carried out in 2013 to study the species composition of the scleractinian coral families Fungiidae, Agariciidae and Euphylliidae. A total of 56 species was rec...

Table S1

Figure S1

Table S2

Figure S2

Table S3

The monospecific scleractinian coral genus Sclerophyllia Klunzinger, 187956. Klunzinger, C. B. (1879). Die Korallenthiere des Rothen Meeres, 3. Theil: Die Steinkorallen. Zweiter Abschnitt: Die Asteraeaceen und Fungiaceen, Berlin: Gutmann.View all references was originally described from Al-Qusayr (Egypt) in the Red Sea based on a series of solitary...

A new scleractinian coral species, Pachyseris inattesa sp. n., is described from the Red Sea. Despite a superficial resemblance with some species in the agariciid genus Leptoseris with which it has been previously confused, P. inattesa sp. n. has micro-morphological characters typical of the genus Pachyseris. This genus, once part of the Agariciida...