Enhancing early life stages success of Orbicella faveolata in a climate change era

TCoral reefs provide habitat to many organisms, while protecting shorelines and contributing to sustainability of livelihoods. Unfortunately, these valuable ecosystems are exposed to multiple stressors that are reducing coral populations faster than they can reproduce and recover. As a result, many coral reef ecosystems collapse with a concurrent loss of their ecosystem services. Global warming in particular is compromising coral reefs: heatwaves increasingly cause mass mortalities of corals and are likely to reduce their capacity to produce viable offspring during spawning events. Several coral restoration techniques have sparked to help counteract coral reef decline, including methods to obtain and culture sexual coral recruits. Sexual propagation methods enable the implementation of selective breeding as an additional tool to improve the resilience of coral reef restoration efforts to stressors such as climate change. The aim of this thesis is to establish a thermo-resilient population of the Caribbean boulder coral Orbicella faveolata, an important reef-building species, through selective breeding.