Hybrid vigor for thermal tolerance observed in the Caribbean hybrid coral, Acropora prolifera
The only widely accepted coral hybrid system consists of the once dominant but now threatened Caribbean species, Acropora cervicornis and A. palmata. Once considered rare, recent field observations suggest that their hybrid, A. prolifera, is increasing in prevalence not only in the parental species' habitats, but thriving in shallow environments characterized by extreme temperatures and irradiance, suggesting the hybrid may be less susceptible to future warming scenarios. In this work, we test whether A. prolifera is more thermally tolerant than either parental species and use gene expression to understand how the hybrid is able to withstand a changing environment. This submission contains all raw fastq files used for assembling annotated transcriptomes for each taxon (A. cervicornis, A. palmata, A. prolifera), and the final coral-host transcriptomes. Code for transcriptome assembly, symbiont-filtering, and annotation can be found at C. Cornelia Osborne's github repository https://github.com/Velveteenie/Caribbean_Acropora_Transcriptomes as well as the associated annotation files.