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Mediterranean Corals Through Time: From Miocene to Present

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The Mediterranean Sea

Abstract

Stony corals, especially scleractinians, are a recurrent component of the benthic fauna of the Mediterranean basin and its Mesozoic-to-Cenozoic precursors. Both morphological and geochemical features of coral skeletons place these organisms among the most important natural paleoarchives of the Mediterranean geological history. The present day low diversity of the Mediterranean scleractinian fauna (25 genera and only 33 species) strikingly contrasts with its high diversity in the Early-Middle Miocene (over 80 genera and hundreds of species). The decline in coral richness has occurred since the late Middle Miocene onwards. This impoverishment trend was not linear, but abrupt in shallow-water environments during and immediately after the Late Miocene and more gradual since the Pliocene onwards. At the end of the Miocene, the Mediterranean coral fauna underwent a drastic modification that led to the disappearance of almost all zooxanthellate corals and the well-established shallow-water coral-reef province. However, the generic diversity of azooxanthellate and deep-water corals did not undergo significant modifications, that were instead much stronger at the end of the Pliocene and of the Pleistocene. Indeed, before the Calabrian stage, all remnant Indo-Pacific-like azooxanthellate genera disappeared and a clear NE Atlantic affinity was established, whereas at the Pleistocene – Holocene boundary, there was a clear reduction in psychrospheric deep-water taxa. The causes that led to the impoverishment of the Mediterranean coral fauna diversity are complex and not all fully understood. However, there is a clear link between the coral diversity decrease, the gradual northward shift outside the tropical belt of the Mediterranean region, and the major climate modifications on a global scale during the last 20 million years.

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Acknowledgements

This article is a contribution to the EU CoralFISH (contract n° 213144), Hermione (contract n° 226354), and Coconet (contract n° 287844) programmes, to the BIOMAP project of Regione Puglia, to the RITMARE project and to “Dote ricercatori” (FSE, Regione Lombardia). The contribution of AV was facilitated by the ESF COCARDE-ERN network. ISMAR-CNR Bologna scientific contribution n. 1780. We warmly thank Enzo Burgio, Stephen Cairns, Italo Di Geronimo, Daniele Ormezzano, Antonietta Rosso, Paolo Serventi and Helmut Zibrowius for their kind support with the fossil and Recent Scleractinian collections mentioned in the text and for constructive discussions. Thanks are due to Valerio Spadini for providing information on corals from the Pliocene Basin of Siena and to Luca Pedriali for supplying the Ceratotrochus (E.) duodecimcostatus specimen presented in Fig. 14.5. Moreover, we sincerely thank Captains, Officers, Crew and Colleagues aboard R/V Urania (during the CNR cruises CORTI, GECO, CORSARO, MARCOS, DECORS; 2003–2011), R/V Universitatis (during the APLABES, 2003–2005, and CoralFISH-MAGIC, 2010, cruises) and R/V Meteor (during the M70-1 cruise, 2006) for their collaboration in the study of modern and fossil (submerged) Mediterranean deep-sea corals. Constructive criticism on the manuscript by Nancy Budd, Paolo Montagna and Mark Wilson is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza della Scienza 4, 20126, Milan, Italy

    Agostina Vertino

  2. Institute of Paleobiology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Twarda 51/55, 00-818, Warsaw, Poland

    Jarosław Stolarski

  3. Department of Chemical and Geological Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, L.go S. Eufemia 19, 41100, Modena, Italy

    Francesca R. Bosellini

  4. Institute of Marine Sciences, National Research Council (ISMAR-CNR), Bologna, via Gobetti 101, 40129, Bologna, Italy

    Marco Taviani

  5. Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 266 Woods Hole Road, Woods Hole, MA, 02543, USA

    Marco Taviani

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  1. Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences, Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Stefano Goffredo

  2. Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Zvy Dubinsky

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Vertino, A., Stolarski, J., Bosellini, F.R., Taviani, M. (2014). Mediterranean Corals Through Time: From Miocene to Present. In: Goffredo, S., Dubinsky, Z. (eds) The Mediterranean Sea. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6704-1_14

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