life span of corals

MrBillLumberg

MrBillLumberg

New member
Does anyone have or know of any articles that detail the life spans of various corals? For example how long does a zoanthid polyp live? It would be interesting to see some data on this.

Thanks!

Chris
 
im not sure about any statistics, but i know that I have heard of large anemones that are estimated to be 50+ years old... i know that i have some LPS that are around 15 now...
 
There's a Stichodactyla sp. anemone off the Solomon Islands thats supposedly been known since the late 1800s.

Some species of Xenia apparently have a 2 year life cycle- the shortest natural life span I'm aware of for a coral.

For many massive LPS (think Montastrea or other Faviids for examples), its a tricky question to answer, and depends on your definition of "lifespan". Core samples of some colonies reveal that they are centuries old. But remember, a colony is a collection of identical clones, all of which budded from an original single polyped individual that had loooong since disappeared. Since in many species those clones arise from the original polyp splitting into multiple clones, each subsequent split contains an ever decreasing percentage of "original" tissue. So, is it still one individual? A colony? Something else? Its really tough to define in cases like that.
 
Hormigaquatica said:
There's a Stichodactyla sp. anemone off the Solomon Islands thats supposedly been known since the late 1800s.

Some species of Xenia apparently have a 2 year life cycle- the shortest natural life span I'm aware of for a coral.

For many massive LPS (think Montastrea or other Faviids for examples), its a tricky question to answer, and depends on your definition of "lifespan". Core samples of some colonies reveal that they are centuries old. But remember, a colony is a collection of identical clones, all of which budded from an original single polyped individual that had loooong since disappeared. Since in many species those clones arise from the original polyp splitting into multiple clones, each subsequent split contains an ever decreasing percentage of "original" tissue. So, is it still one individual? A colony? Something else? Its really tough to define in cases like that.
Click to expand...


I think it would be fabulously interesting to do a project looking at the emergence of single nucleotide polymorphisms in sequence of the DNA of core polyps vs surrounding polyps. if you mapped the SNPs and the prevalence of SNPs as function of position of the colony, you might see a fractal. sweet. there is an inevitable degree of mutation...then again much less than you would expect in a sexual reproduction scheme. hmm.
 
chrisv said:
I think it would be fabulously interesting to do a project looking at the emergence of single nucleotide polymorphisms in sequence of the DNA of core polyps vs surrounding polyps. if you mapped the SNPs and the prevalence of SNPs as function of position of the colony, you might see a fractal. sweet. there is an inevitable degree of mutation...then again much less than you would expect in a sexual reproduction scheme. hmm.
Click to expand...

I couldn't of said it better lol. Interesting!

-dan
 
chrisv said:
I think it would be fabulously interesting to do a project looking at the emergence of single nucleotide polymorphisms in sequence of the DNA of core polyps vs surrounding polyps. if you mapped the SNPs and the prevalence of SNPs as function of position of the colony, you might see a fractal. sweet. there is an inevitable degree of mutation...then again much less than you would expect in a sexual reproduction scheme. hmm.
Click to expand...

It would be really cool to see a project like that. If only we could get someone to pony up the $$$
 
this is a great topic of convo and interest imo... I often think of this as well... I am kind of thinking of it like this. I dont see, if conditions allowed, any reason why a sps colony in particular would ever die out as long as conditions were right... like say i have one coral colony now, and I am now 33. Let's say i live to 83. as long as i am able to care for the colony, and dont have any silly mishaps along the way, i dont see why this coral couldnt still be alive and thriving 50 years from now... I wont say they could live forever even given the right conditions and assuming there would never be harsh changes to its enviroment, but i dont see why a colony couldnt last a couple hundred years easy... again, given the enviromental conditions are maintained and hold up...

jmo...

great topic!
 
and for that matter, it makes you wonder how closely related all of the corals in the US hobby are...like...i wonder how big the founder stock of green slimer acropora was. If everyone in the hobby has "lineage corals" (eg tyree/ORA) and those corals have a mutation that makes them susceptible to a yet to be observed pathogen that somehow gets introduced to the hobby through wild live rock or something, would everyones green slimer or red planet die as water and whatnot moves through the hobby? it might not be observable in the wild because there would be MANY many different genetic backgrounds represented, but by imposing a genetic bottleneck in the population by selectively fragging and distributing corals form a specific lineage, all the corals form that lineage share a largely similar genetic background...with the exception of mutations that have arisen de novo since the coral came into the hobby.


I think that the government of australia and the US national human genome research institute started doign workon corals and abandoned them. I think they did a. millipora and porites... will look for a link.
 
it also would depend on wether the coral was a multicellular coral or a colony of single celled organisms. i dont know if anyone has looked into the idea that there may be a specific population of cells in a budding organism that consistently contribute to the buds...cells dividing indefinitely must eventually reach sinesence unless they have the capacity for self renewal.... coral stem cell niche?
 
Chrisv,

While an interesting idea, I don't know how much information that would give us. Yes, they are (largely) clonal, but given the generation time vs rate of mutation in the chromosome, I seriously doubt SNP detection would result in the discovery of much genetic polymorphism. Some, certainly. But in a given colony there probably wouldn't be much.

Think of it this way: from a bacteriological standpoint (much shorter generation times, totally clonal), it takes on the order of billions or trillions of cells to find a single SNP generation to generation. So finding even one SNP in a colony consisting of thousands or even millions of individual polyps is probably a losing bet.

Like I said, interesting idea, but I don't envision it being a tractable approach.
 
good point.

has any progress been made looking in to DNA repair mechanisms in corals? anything sitting in direct equatorial sun must have evolved a more efficient way of dealing with mutations...
 
That is one thing I have zero expertise in :) But yes, it does stand to reason that they may have a more efficient polymerase, or better repair mechanisms. It could also just be that they have pigments which block the UV light, like certain cyanobacteria have (the stringy green kind, not the purple kind we hate ;))
 
I'm not sure about corals but I've read that anemones do not go through senescence, meaning that they are practically immortal.
 
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