Grainger College of Engineering, All Events

Coral larval settlement is a critical factor in reef restoration strategies. However, it is also a highly selective process governed by the integration of multiple environmental cues. Identifying and controlling these cues will help to maximize restoration outcomes in degraded coral reef ecosystems.

While chemical inducers such as crustose coralline algae (CCA) metabolites are known to trigger metamorphosis, larvae simultaneously evaluate a range of physical and mechanical features of the substrate before committing to attachment. Understanding how these cues interact, and which ones dominate under controlled conditions is the goal of my research.

In this seminar, I present results from a series of laboratory experiments designed to isolate and compare the effects of chemical and physical settlement cues in Caribbean coral larvae. 

Together with the rest of the team, we tested the influence of substrate composition, porosity, hydrophobicity, surface roughness, three-dimensional microtopography, external fields, and the addition of the chemical inducer tetrabromopyrrole (TBP).

Our findings show that TBP is a strong and reliable trigger of metamorphosis, but that settlement patterns and attachment outcomes are strongly modulated by physical context. Microrefugia consistently shaped where and how larvae settled, whereas several commonly assumed drivers showed limited or no effect under controlled conditions. Together, these results emphasize that coral settlement is not driven by chemistry alone, but by the combined interpretation of chemical and physical cues.

Speaker Bio: Joaquin Yus is a chemist with a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering by the Universidad Carlos 3rd de Madrid, working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His work interests reside at the interface of materials engineering, biomechanics, and coral reef ecology. His research focuses on how physical, biochemical, and mechanical properties of engineered substrates influence coral larval settlement, and survival, with the goal of improving active reef restoration strategies. He combines advanced materials processing, surface characterization, and controlled biological assays to identify design principles for next-generation restoration platforms. His work is supported by NSF IOS and CBET programs.