Abstract
Xeniid corals (Cnidaria: Alcyonacea), a family of soft corals, include species displaying a characteristic pulsing behavior. This behavior has been shown to increase oxygen diffusion away from the coral tissue, resulting in higher photosynthetic rates from mutualistic symbionts. Maintaining such a pulsing behavior comes at a high energetic cost, and it has been proposed that coordinating the pulse of individual polyps within a colony might enhance the efficiency of fluid transport. In this paper, we test whether patterns of collective pulsing emerge in coral colonies and investigate possible interactions between polyps within a colony. We video recorded different colonies of Heteroxenia sp. in a laboratory environment. Our methodology is based on the systematic integration of a computer vision algorithm (ISOMAP) and an information-theoretic approach (transfer entropy), offering a vantage point to assess coordination in collective pulsing. Perhaps surprisingly, we did not detect any form of collective pulsing behavior in the colonies. Using artificial data sets, however, we do demonstrate that our methodology is capable of detecting even weak information transfer. The lack of a coordination is consistent with previous work on many cnidarians where coordination between actively pulsing polyps and medusa has not been observed. In our companion paper, we show that there is no fluid dynamic benefit of coordinated pulsing, supporting this result. The lack of coordination coupled with no obvious fluid dynamic benefit to grouping suggests that there may be non-fluid mechanical advantages to forming colonies, such as predator avoidance and defense.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) for hosting the workshop that got this project started. This material was based upon work partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant DMS-1638521 to the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.” FundingLAM was supported by NSF PHY Grant #1504777 (to LAM), NSF DMS Grant #1127914 (to the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute), and the DFG Centre of Excellence 2117 “Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour” (ID: 422037984). Travel support for JES was obtained from a Travelling Fellowship from the Company of Biologists. During this project, JES was supported by a SAMSI Fellowship and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Student Research Fellowship, and by the Women Diver’s Hall of Fame for dive training. MP was supported by NSF through Grant # CMMI-1433670 and CBET-1547864.
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Samson, J.E., Ray, D.D., Porfiri, M. et al. Collective Pulsing in Xeniid Corals: Part I—Using Computer Vision and Information Theory to Search for Coordination. Bull Math Biol 82, 90 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-020-00759-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-020-00759-2