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Where Do Clonal Coral Larvae Go? Adult Genotypic Diversity Conflicts With Reproductive Effort In The Brooding Coral Pocillopora Damicornis, David J. Ayre, Karen Miller

Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health - Papers: part A

Earlier studies of the coral Pocillopora damicornis provide a conflicting picture of its use of sexual and asexual reproduction for population maintenance. In Western Australia, colonies are asexually viviparous, and populations appear to be maintained by localised asexual recruitment but founded by genotypically diverse colonists. However, on Australia¹s Great Barrier Reef (GBR), as in many other regions, populations display little or no evidence of any asexual recruitment. We used allozyme electrophoresis to test for asexual input into local populations of P. damicornis at One Tree Island on the southern GBR. Contrary to expectation we found that all of 136 planulae …