The evolutionary origin of scleractinian (stony or hard corals) is estimated to be as early as 425 million years ago, with a sudden appearance in the fossil record ~240 Ma. While modern coral reefs are much younger, corals as an evolutionary strategy have thus made it through millions of years of severe environmental disturbances, including mass extinction events. This extreme resilience holds promise for threatened and changing coral reefs, an ecosystem that is currently considered one of the most vulnerable under climate change. In order for stewards to design impactful strategies to restore coral reefs, we must first have a robust understanding of these systems, which the Sandin Lab investigates through the lens of population and community ecology. 

Our team is broadly interested in benthic community ecology, coral demography, spatial ecology, and the innovation of new methods for the study of the community and population ecology of coral reefs. 

Along the way, we have found some interesting things. We have demonstrated that the Janzen-Connell model as a mechanism for coexistence can operate in marine ecosystems and in an animal (coral), that some juvenile coral taxa like unconsolidated habitat and to aggregate near adult conspecifics, that a coral colony’s fate can be linked to its size, that the impacts of thermal stress on coral mortality have lessened over time in certain regions, that the spatial patterns of many coral taxa on a remote reef in the central Pacific are clustered, and more. 

There are still many more fundamental ecological insights to be gained from studying coral reefs and coral holobionts across geographies.