How to Survive Intensive Harvesting: The High Recruitment Rates of the Precious Mediterranean Red Coral (Corallium rubrum L. 1758)

The recruitment process is a fundamental step in population life cycles that determines survival, population demographic structure, and dynamics. The success of recruitment events repeated over successive years greatly affects the survival of long-lived gorgonian populations. Here, we report the recruitment process of the precious, heavily harvested Mediterranean gorgonian Corallium rubrum (red coral) on both settlement tiles and natural substrates over different Mediterranean areas. Red coral is a gonochoric internal brooder that reproduces in early summer. Lecithotrophic planulae settle 15–30 days after release in semi-dark environments at depths between 15 and 800 m. In autumn, 0.58–0.68 mm-wide recruits can be observed on the vaults of small crevices and caves and on rocky cliffs and boulders. Owing to their small size, there is limited knowledge of C. rubrum recruitment in the field. In this study, we examined the recruitment density and distribution in Canadells (Banyuls sur Mer, France) and Calafuria (Livorno, Italy) and compared these findings with those collected over different Mediterranean areas. Red coral exhibited high recruitment values ranging from 0.43 to 13.19 recruits dm−2. The distribution pattern of recruits, examined at a small spatial scale via nearest-neighbor distance analysis, revealed a significantly higher patch frequency on the natural substrate than on settlement tiles, presumably because of the scarcely available spots of free space on the former substrate, which are crowded by competitor species.