Table 1.
Corallite morphological characters.
Fig 1.
Corallite morphology photo panel.
(A) Five of the eight morphometric characters chosen for this study superimposed over a Montastraea cavernosa corallite. (B) Vertical morphometric characters superimposed over a transverse section of a corallite. (C) Typical corallite appearance for ‘shallow’ morphotype, with corallite spacing character superimposed. (D) Typical corallite appearance for ‘depth-generalist’ morphotype. Panels (C) and (D) were photographed at equal scales. Character abbreviations as in Table 1.
Table 2.
Corallite sample means.
Fig 2.
Boxplots with sample overlays for corallite spacing (CS), corallite diameter (CD), corallite height (CH), and theca height (TH) across six sites and two depth zones in the Gulf of Mexico. Overall p values represent Kruskal-Wallis tests across sites and depth zones for each metric and different letters denote significant differences (p<0.05) between pairwise comparisons of sites and depth zones generated by Dunn’s tests.
Fig 3.
Principal coordinates analysis.
Principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) ordination of corallite morphology across six sites in the Gulf of Mexico, explaining 88.5% of the total variation (PCo 1: 69.2%, PCo 2: 19.3%). Degree of difference among samples represented by Euclidean distance between sample points. Color and shape of each point corresponds to site and depth zone.
Fig 4.
Comparison of morphotype assignment methods.
Principal coordinates analyses (PCoA) of corallite morphology across six sites in the Gulf of Mexico, with color overlays corresponding to morphotypes. Morphotype assignments were made using a k-means cluster test (left; kRCLUSTER: R = 0.746) and by the threshold in corallite spacing measurements at 8.40 mm (right). Assignments using the corallite spacing method had a correct assignment rate of 93.87% when compared to assignments from the k-means clustering method (13 incorrect out of 212 assignments, shown in gray).
Table 3.
Morphotype sample means.
Fig 5.
Boxplots with sample overlays for corallite spacing (CS), corallite diameter (CD), corallite height (CH), and length of first cycle septa (L1S) across depth-generalist (n = 20) and shallow (n = 46) morphotypes sampled within the shallow zone of West and East FGB. Overall p values represent Mann-Whitney U tests between morphotype for each metric.