Table 1.
Lowest levels of coral recruit taxonomic identification in the literature.
Figure 1.
Map of study sites in southern Taiwan.
The number of retrieved plates is indicated in parentheses. Abbreviations of sites: WLT, Wanlitung; HC, Hungchai; LDS, Leidashih; OL, outlet of warm water discharge from nuclear power plant; HBH, Hobihu; TS, Tiaoshi; TZB, Tantzei Bay; SJW, Shinjaowan; LK, Longkeng.
Table 2.
Recruitment rate and coral coverage among study sites.
Table 3.
Detailed information regarding the number of plates deposited/retrieved, number of spats collected/identified, number of identified spats from different genera, and recruitment rate/identification rate per plate at all sites.
Figure 2.
Coral spat settled on recruitment plates.
(A) Normal image of coral spats on plate; (B) fluorescent image of coral spats on plate; and (C) different early life stages of settled Pocillopora corals.
Figure 3.
Efficiency of COI barcoding on spats of different sizes.
All sizes found in this study were successfully identified with COI barcoding, except those <10 mm2, which had an 86.7% (157/181) identification rate. The bar chart represents the number of spats and the dot with blue line represents the identification rates for different sizes.
Figure 4.
NJ tree of scleractinian COI sequences.
Neighbor-joining tree of mitochondrial COI sequence constructed by Tamura three-parameter model with 1000 bootstrap replications. The genus with its sample number in parentheses labeled in bold was discovered from a settlement plate in this study. All other generic sequences were obtained from the database of the Barcode of Life (www.barcodeoflife.org).
Figure 5.
NJ tree of PaxC sequences for Acropora/Isopora identification.
(A) Neighbor-joining tree of PaxC constructed by Tamura three-parameter model with 1000 bootstrap replications. The sequences of coral spat and reference corals in this study are labeled in bold and filled squares, respectively. All other PaxC sequences are from reference [67].
Figure 6.
NJ tree of the mitochondrial ORF sequence of Pocillopora.
Neighbor-joining tree of ORF sequence constructed by Tamura 92 model with sequences from [51] and [53] (personal communication). Samples from different sites and numbers in parentheses labeled in bold were discovered from the settlement plate in this study. There are four mitochondrial haplotypes (alpha, beta, gamma, and epsilon) found in P. damicornis.
Figure 7.
Recruitment among study sites.
(A) Site recruitment rate ranking (from the highest to lowest). Error bars represent the standard error (SE). (B) Recruitment composition was identified by COI sequences among sites.