This book opens with case studies of reefs in the Red Sea, Caribbean, Japan, Indian Ocean and the Great Barrier Reef. A section on microbial ecology and physiology describes the symbiotic relations of corals and microbes, and the microbial role in nutrition or bleaching resistance of corals. Coral diseases are covered in the third part. The volume includes 50 color photos of corals and their environments

Coral disease is quickly becoming a crisis to the health and management of the world’s coral reefs. There is a great interest from many in preserving coral reefs. Unfortunately, the field of epizootiology is disorganized and lacks a standard vocabulary, methods, and diagnostic techniques, and tropical marine scientists are poorly trained in wildlife pathology, veterinary medicine, and epidemiology. Diseases of Coral will help to rectify this situation.

This work presents a detailed study of two coral diseases currently prevalent on Indo-Pacific coral reefs. Black Band Disease (BBD) has been first reported from Caribbean reefs and has been investigated in this study on reefs in the Republic of Palau. White Syndrome (WS) has been reported from many locations on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and throughout the Indo-Pacific Ocean. This work identified causative agents for WS, which are all members of the Gammaproteobacteria family Vibrionaceae. This study follows the identification of WS coral pathogens from the initial isolation of putative pathogens, through the design and execution of infection experiments, to the final phylogenic classification of these deadly pathogens and the identification of their unique virulence mechanism. Readers with general interest in the field of coral diseases will find great benefit following the narrative of this study, while scientists specializing in the study of coral diseases will find in this detailed and comprehensive work a detailed manual to mastering the art of coral pathogen identification.

During the last decades there has been an increasing evidence of drastic changes in marine ecosystems due to human-induced impacts, especially on benthic ecosystems. The so called “animal forests” are currently showing a dramatic loss of biomass and biodiversity all over the world. These communities are dominated by sessile suspension feeder organisms (such as sponges, corals, gorgonians, bivalves, etc.) that generate three-dimensional structures, similar to the trees in the terrestrial forest. The animal forest provide several ecosystem services such as food, protection and nursery to the associated fauna, playing an important role in the local hydrodynamic and biogeochemical cycles near the sea floor and acting also as carbon sinks. The present book focus its attention on these three dimensional animal structures including, for the first time, all the different types of animal forests of the world in a single volume.

Disease is an ecological process that regulates hosts, but does not affect all host populations and communities uniformly. The extent to which populations and communities are affected by disease is determined by a suite of intrinsic factors such as host demography, susceptibility, and immunocompetence, as well as environmental extrinsic factors, which can alter host-pathogen interactions. Coral disease is a leading contributor to global coral reef decline, highlighting the importance of testing the role of intrinsic and extrinsic factors in disease affecting natural systems. Further, the ability of corals to respond to disease is influenced by the dynamics of innate immunity. The broad goals of this dissertation are to (1) address the patterns and processes of coral health and disease along the west coast of the Island of Hawai'i (WHI), which has some of the highest disease levels in the Pacific; and (2) investigate the temporal dynamics of the cellular immune response, using a Caribbean sea fan as a model system. Ecological processes including disease, competition for space, and predation strongly influence the health of coral communities. In Chapter 1, I characterize the spatial and temporal patterns in coral disease and other biological interactions, describes long-term changes in coral cover, and identifies sites of concern for management action along WHI. The spatial extent of disease in communities is determined by an integrated series of host population- and community-level processes. In Chapter 2, I test the effects of host demographics, coral species richness, predation and disease cooccurrence on the risk of three most common diseases affecting the scleractinian coral Porites. In addition to host ecology, disease is often influenced by environmental stress. In Chapter 3, I identify the risk factors contributing to dynamics of Porites growth anomalies by testing the correlation between prevalence, severity and linear extension, and ecological and environmental parameters across gradients of terrestrial input. Immune responses often determine an organism's success in pathogen and stress response. In Chapter 4, I use G. ventalina to characterize the temporal dynamics of cellular responses (granular amoebocyte aggregation and prophenoloxidase activation) to allogenic grafts in a series of laboratory and field experiments.