Why Do Corals Bleach? Conflict and Conflict Mediation in a Host/Symbiont Community

Coral bleaching has attracted considerable study, yet one central question remains unanswered: given that corals and their Symbiodinium symbionts have co‐evolved for millions of years, why does this clearly maladaptive process occur? Bleaching may result from evolutionary conflict between the host corals and their symbionts. Selection at the level of the individual symbiont favors using the products of photosynthesis for selfish replication, while selection at the higher level favors using these products for growth of the entire host/symbiont community. To hold the selfish lower‐level units in check, mechanisms of conflict mediation must evolve. Fundamental features of photosynthesis have been co‐opted into conflict mediation so that symbionts that fail to export these products produce high levels of reactive oxygen species and undergo programmed cell death. These mechanisms function very well under most environmental conditions, but under conditions particularly detrimental to photosynthesis, it is these mechanisms of conflict mediation that trigger bleaching.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Bioessays

• Publication date

  2018-06-26

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1002/bies.201800021PMID 29944191
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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