Carly Kenkel
University of Southern California, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Caribbean coral reefs have declined sharply, and whether they persist under climate change depends on whether corals can shift their traits fast enough to cope. That can happen through plasticity, meaning changes within one coral's lifetime, or through genetic variation that lets populations adapt over generations.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Genetics
- Topics
coral reefs
staghorn coral
Acropora cervicornis
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether differences in staghorn coral shape plasticity are driven by changes in calcification and fine-scale skeletal deposition, using a lab water-flow experiment on clonal replicates of Acropora cervicornis genotypes.
- Measure costs and trade-offs that may limit plasticity, testing how plastic and less plastic coral genotypes respond to temperature and acidification stress and how much they invest in reproduction, in field and lab experiments.
- Build experimental A. cervicornis reefs that differ in their capacity for shape change and measure the diversity of fish and invertebrates they support, along with reef production and calcification.
- Determine whether coral heat tolerance is fixed by host and symbiont genotype or changes after transplantation, using a reciprocal transplant across Bahamian nurseries followed by heat stress experiments.
- Field-test heat tolerance in about 260 staghorn coral genets with CBASS portable heat-stress systems, and use shallow whole-genome resequencing to find DNA regions linked to thermal tolerance.
More about the research
Both of these collaborative projects focus on the endangered staghorn coral, Acropora cervicornis, a foundational reef-builder. Reef managers propagate this species in nurseries by cutting clonal fragments of chosen genotypes (genetically unique individuals) and transplanting them, so knowing which corals cope best has direct practical value.
Why it matters
Reef restoration in Florida and the wider Caribbean relies on growing and transplanting selected staghorn coral genotypes. This work could help restoration groups such as Mote Marine Laboratory, nursery managers and government agencies choose corals that tolerate heat and adjust well to new sites. It could also help them design restored reefs that better support fish and invertebrate communities as oceans warm and acidify.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: ORCC: The role of adaptive plasticity in coral response to climate change
NSF · Sep 2022 – Aug 2027
Collaborative Research: Investigating the genomic basis of key performance traits to quantify the evolutionary potential of coral populations under climate change
NSF · Jan 2021 – Nov 2026
Closest labs
Benjamin Glass
Boston University, MA·Ecology & Evolution
Profile temperature, oxygen and other abiotic conditions at a Bermuda coral reef to define realistic stress scenarios.
Kathleen Lotterhos
Northeastern University, MA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Quantify genetic variation in cold tolerance, overwintering survival and post-winter reproduction, and the reaction norms of these traits in summer and winter morphs, using Drosophila suzukii flies from Vermont and Kentucky.
Robert Van Woesik
Florida Institute of Technology, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Quantify differences in coral recovery rates after thermal-stress events worldwide using spatio-temporal Bayesian models, which estimate how recovery varies across both place and time.
The school
University of Southern California: 47 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.