Adult corals enhance juvenile recruitment through cumulative ecological niche construction

Abstract

Ecosystem engineers are ecological niche constructors: by modifying local environments, they alter the conditions under which organisms establish, persist and interact. Although niche construction is often framed as a population-level evolutionary feedback, it could also operate at the assemblage level when communities collectively shape their environments and filter future recruitment. Reef-building corals provide a perfect system to test this idea because adult colonies form three-dimensional carbonate structures that can persist after colony death, creating an inherited habitat for subsequent coral generations. Here, we tested whether coral recruitment to the juvenile stage was associated with local adult coral abundance, reef structure, and larval settlement supply. Combining spatially explicit coral censuses, photogrammetric reef digital elevation models and data from settlement tiles across 15 reef sites at two time points at Jiigurru, Great Barrier Reef, we found that juvenile abundance increased additively on the log scale with adult abundance and with fractal dimension, a metric of fine-scale structural complexity. Surface rugosity had weaker effects, and interactions between adult abundance and habitat structure were limited, indicating largely additive, rather than synergistic or antagonistic, effects. Our results show that both adult assemblages and the concurrent structural complexity, consistent with assemblage-level niche construction and ecological inheritance theory, shape coral recruitment.