Coral adaptation to climate change: Meta-analysis reveals high heritability across multiple traits

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change is a rapidly intensifying selection pressure on biodiversity across the globe and, particularly, on the world's coral reefs. The rate of adaptation to climate change is proportional to the amount of phenotypic variation that can be inherited by subsequent generations (i.e., narrow-sense heritability, h2). Thus, traits that have higher heritability (e.g., h2 > 0.5) are likely to adapt to future conditions faster than traits with lower heritability (e.g., h2 < 0.1). Here, we synthesize 95 heritability estimates across 19 species of reef-building corals. Our meta-analysis reveals low heritability (h2 < 0.25) of gene expression metrics, intermediate heritability (h2 ..