. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2012 Dec 10.

Published in final edited form as: Dis Aquat Organ. 2009 Nov 16;87(1-2):79–90. doi: 10.3354/dao02083

Table 1.

Effect of exposure of apparently healthy coral fragments to purified microcystin LR (MC-LR) and sulfide. Exposure ranged from 18 to 22.5 hours. Representative scanning electron micrographs are shown in Figure 3.

Exposure to MC-LR and/or Sulfide	Bacterial Growth	Coral Tissue	Zooxanthellae
Control (seawater)	Very low	Healthy and intact epidermis and gastrodermis	Healthy, in gastrodermis
1 µg l⁻¹ MC-LR	High	Epidermis thinned or absent, gastrodermis degraded	Healthy, in clusters within gastrodermis or on surface
50 µg l⁻¹ MC-LR	Low	Epidermis vacuolated, degraded gastrodermis	Healthy, in clusters within gastrodermis
100 µg l⁻¹ MC-LR	Low	Epidermis thinned or absent, degraded gastrodermis	Some degradation, in clusters within gastrodermis or on surface
50 µg l⁻¹ MC-LR 0.5 mM sulfide	Low	Epidermis thinned or vacuolated, degraded gastrodermis	Some degradation, extruded from gastrodermis
100 µg l⁻¹ MC-LR 0.5 mM sulfide	Low	Epidermis and gastrodermis thinned or absent	Large clusters on surface, some degradation
0.5 mM sulfide	Cyano-bacterial filaments present	Epidermis vacuolated or thinned, gastrodermis degraded	Appear healthy, in clusters within gastrodermis