- UNESCO-IOC Register of Marine Organisms
|Author||Skeleton?||Mineral or Organic?||Mineral||Percent Magnesium|
|Cairns, Hoeksema, and van der Land, 1999||YES||MINERAL||ARAGONITE|
Catalog Number: USNM 93956
Collection: Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Department of Invertebrate Zoology
Collector(s): H. Guzman
Year Collected: 1992
Locality: Panama Bay, Urava Island, Panama, Gulf of Panama, North Pacific Ocean
Depth (m): 7 to 8.5
- Holotype: Budd & Guzman. 1994. Proc. Biol. Soc. Wash. 107(4): 591-599, figs.2,3,5,6.
Habitat and Ecology
The genus Siderastrea contains only five extant species (Van-Oppen et al. 2006). Budd and Guzmán (1994) hypothesized that S. glynni originated from a rare dispersal event from the central Pacific. However, new studies conducted by Forsman et al. (2005) have revealed that it is more likely that S. glynni originated by a breach of the Panama Isthmus, or by a contemporary introduction by ship.
Glynn (1997) suggested that S. glynni could be an ENSO immigrant, and that colonies perhaps settled and started growing sometime between 1982 and 1985. Glynn (1994) agued that this could be possible if there is a source population located in the Gulf of Panama or elsewhere in the equatorial eastern Pacific (Glynn 1997).
IUCN Red List Assessment
Red List Category
Red List Criteria
After the removal of S. glynni from the wild, signs of bleaching stopped with temperature control; moreover the colonies are now in good health (Guzmán pers. comm.). Attempts made by H. Guzmán to propagate this corals in the STRI aquaria have produced 11 propagules (Guzmán pers. comm., Fenner 2001).
Other threats to this species include coastal development and oil production and transport in the Gulf of Panama (Guzmán pers comm.).
In general, the major threat to corals is global climate change, in particular, temperature extremes leading to bleaching and increased susceptibility to disease, increased severity of ENSO events and storms, and ocean acidification. In addition to global climate change, corals are also threatened by disease and a number of localized threats. The severity of these combined threats to the global population of each individual species is not known.
Coral disease has emerged as a serious threat to coral reefs worldwide and is a major cause of reef deterioration (Weil et al. 2006). The numbers of diseases and coral species affected, as well as the distribution of diseases have all increased dramatically within the last decade (Porter et al. 2001, Green and Bruckner 2000, Sutherland et al. 2004, Weil 2004). Coral disease epizootics have resulted in significant losses of coral cover and were implicated in the dramatic decline of acroporids in the Florida Keys (Aronson and Precht 2001, Porter et al. 2001, Patterson et al. 2002). In the Indo-Pacific, disease is also on the rise with disease outbreaks recently reported from the Great Barrier Reef (Willis et al. 2004), Marshall Islands (Jacobson 2006) and the northwestern Hawaiian Islands (Aeby 2006). Increased coral disease levels on the Great Barrier Reef were correlated with increased ocean temperatures (Willis et al. 2007) supporting the prediction that disease levels will be increasing with higher sea surface temperatures. Escalating anthropogenic stressors combined with the threats associated with global climate change of increases in coral disease, frequency and duration of coral bleaching and ocean acidification place coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific at high risk of collapse.
Localized threats to corals include fisheries, human development (industry, settlement, tourism, and transportation), changes in native species dynamics (competitors, predators, pathogens and parasites), invasive species (competitors, predators, pathogens and parasites), dynamite fishing, chemical fishing, pollution from agriculture and industry, domestic pollution, sedimentation, and human recreation and tourism activities.
Recommended measures for conserving this species include research in taxonomy, population, abundance and trends, ecology and habitat status, threats and resilience to threats, restoration action; identification, establishment and management of new protected areas; expansion of protected areas; recovery management; and disease, pathogen and parasite management. Artificial propagation and techniques such as cryo-preservation of gametes may become important for conserving coral biodiversity.
EOL content is automatically assembled from many different content providers. As a result, from time to time you may find pages on EOL that are confusing.
To request an improvement, please leave a comment on the page. Thank you!