Future tales from ancient reefs: fundamental differences between Last Interglacial and modern coral reef community changes on the island of Curaçao (lower Caribbean)

Alessio Rovere , Patrick T. Boyden, Andreas Haas, Benjamin Mueller, Yusuf C. El-Khaled, Sonia Bejarano, Christian Wild, Eric Mijts, Giovanni Scicchitano, Giovanni Scardino, Denovan Chauveau , Paolo Stocchi, Mark J.A. Vermeij

Coral reefs have experienced widespread and accelerated decline in the last decades, that was driven by a combination of global and local anthropogenic stressors. To contextualize these changes, we compared the composition of coral reef communities on Curaçao between 1973 and 2023 with that of corals preserved in fossil reefs from the Last Interglacial period (128–116 ka), the last geological period of the Earth’s history when global climate was warmer than pre-industrial. These fossil reefs, exposed along the island’s leeward coast, provide a multi-millennial baseline of ecological variability. Our analyses show that the ecological transformation observed on modern reefs over the past five decades exceeds the magnitude and persistence of community variability maintained for more than 12,000 years during the Last Interglacial. This unprecedented transformation, likely driven by accelerating anthropogenic impacts, marks an ecological shift unmatched in the long-term history of Caribbean reef systems and may represent a striking signal of coral community change in the Anthropocene.