Coral Disease in a Warmer World Yakob, L. and Mumby, P.J. 2011.
Climate change induces demographic resistance to disease in
novel coral assemblages. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences USA 108: 1967-1969. In evaluating this unimodal way of
thinking, Yakob and Mumby investigated a number of documented
"changes in coral demography, likely borne of climate change,"
in an attempt to determine the soundness of what we could call
this bad-news-only concept. This work, based on what they
describe as "the best time series of coral epizootics available"
(an outbreak of White Plague type II disease in a population of
Dichocoenia stokesi in the Florida Keys) led them to create a
simple disease model, wherein coral mortality from an initial
disease outbreak reduces the average size of a colony in the
post-outbreak population. And because, as they describe it,
"smaller colonies have a higher rate of mortality, the average
turnover of the post-outbreak population is higher than that
before the outbreak," so tha