Resolving Bootstrap Paradoxes in Coral Bleaching Dynamics Through Nonlinear System States and Recursive Frameworks

Ecological vulnerability of coral reefs contrasts sharply with their persistence through geologic time, creating a paradox from mis-scaled assumptions of time, mortality and organismal dimensionality, namely bleaching susceptibility, mortality, and recovery are treated as linear or sequential outcomes. Recursive definitions built on such mis-scaled assumptions generate straw-man inferences by conflating vulnerability with fragility and obscuring cryptic recovery dynamics. Using post hoc meta-analyses integrating datasets on coral bleaching, life history, reproductive strategy, morphology, and taxonomy, I evaluate system behavior across matrixed categories of thermal exposure and observation timing. Susceptibility emerges as a graded physiological response with weak coupling between predictor importance and variance, whereas mortality exhibits thresholded dynamics consistent with collapse behavior. Partial overlap in predictor structure indicates that bleaching does not represent a direct trajectory toward death, but rather a regulated buffering phase preceding potential tissue-level failure. Skeletal architecture consistently appears as a strong predictor across susceptibility and mortality, while taxonomic identity shows weak and variable effects. Recovery dynamics further indicate host–symbiont restructuring consistent with recursive evolutionary filtering rather than deterministic trait replacement. Together, these findings reframe coral bleaching as a regulated physiological state decoupled from mortality and demonstrate how recursive logic frameworks resolve paradoxes of timing, scale, and resilience in coral bleaching dynamics.