Can self-fertilizing coral species be used to enhance restoration of caribbean reefs?

摘要

Reef restoration programs involving transplantation should be most successful when using coral species exhibiting high reproductive potential, local recruitment, and the ability to tolerate stresses induced by transplantation. One mode of enhancing reproduction, especially when populations densities are low, is through self - fertilization. To determine if the high reproductive output observed in many hermaphroditic brooders is the product of self fertilization, randomly amplified polymorphic DNA was used to quantify selfing rates in three brooding, hermaphroditic Caribbean corals, Favia fragum, Porites astreoides, and agaricia agaricites.