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Self-generated oxygen limitation drives coral outcomes during marine heatwaves

El-Khaled, Y. C.; Khan, H. H.; Klein, S. G.; Garcias-Bonet, N.; Maity, D.; Dighe, S.; Mukha, T.; Kushwaha, A. K.; Wardani, F.; Oulghelou, M.; Dhillon, M. S.; Truman, S.; Garcia, F. C.; Johnson, M. D.; Fox, M.; Duarte, C. M.; Carvalho, S.; Suggett, D.; Peixoto, R. S.; Parsani, M.; Truscott, T. T.

2026-10-09 ecology
10.64898/2026.10.08.757541 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Marine heatwaves cause massive, but often patchy coral bleaching. Why neighboring colonies often respond differently remains unresolved. Here, we show that interactions between metabolic demand and flow-mediated resupply generate heterogeneous oxygen microenvironments inside branching corals under heat stress. During the 2023 and 2024 Red Sea heatwaves, high-frequency in situ measurements revealed hypoxic to near-anoxic interbranch conditions despite well-oxygenated surrounding seawater. In 2023, neighboring colonies developed divergent oxygen regimes preceding paling and bleaching; in 2024, stronger and earlier thermal stress was associated with recurrent nighttime near-anoxia before tissue disintegration and mortality. A physics-based three-dimensional fluid-metabolism model reproduced these patterns. Oxygen depletion and coral impacts emerged when metabolic oxygen demand exceeded flow-mediated resupply. Organism-scale variability in oxygen regimes may explain divergent coral fate under shared heatwave exposure.

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"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.