We all need to budget- but how do coral reefs ?

Coral reefs are a very complex study system, and also could be considered one of the most interesting systems on the planet, and the coral animal itself is no less complex and interesting. For many years they have been a large focus for marine biologists, and with the increasing risk from climate change related environmental stress, the interest in them has only further increased.
Exploring an animals energetic budget, and looking at how resources are differently allocated in healthy animals verse stressed ones has been widely studied in biology. In this review by Lesser (2012), many year (even decades) of literature is reviewed in order to determine how robust the studies on coral energetic budgeting actually are. Several models are explored such as the Dynamic energy budgeting (DEB) and metabolic theory of ecology (MTE) models are assessed for there suitability to be applied to corals, both these models claim to give a comprehensive description of the organismal performance of all life history stages, based on the scaling of metabolic rate, under varying conditions.
Lesser explains some major flaws with many published studied on energy budgeting in corals, with many using indirect measures , such as active chlorophyll fluorescence, which assesses the proportion of functional PSII units, this approach can be useful but has been used in a way that the results where misinterpreted finding and never addresses corals under different stresses making the work done almost redundant.
As well as this many studies don't account for different types of metabolisms (even during a 24 hr period), with many corals switching to anaerobic respiration, this then gives a misrepresentation of the energy used as they do not consider anaerobic metabolites in the energy budgeting report.
Lesser explores a few different models, and each time has the opinion that although the work my be done well, they either 1) assume too many inapplicable assumptions or 2) confound many different factors together without actually determining what is actually changing energetically.
This review paints a nice story of all a lot of the previous work on carbon budgeting in corals, and highly suggests the amount of redundant work (at no fault of the scientists) due to the complexity of coral reefs. With much of the work on corals begging to shift to favor the 'omics', this important aspect of coral biology is being forgotten about. I think this is an area which will be highly beneficial for us to know and understand but with the all the current models all falling down we need a robust, comprehensive model which is applicable to corals, which accounts for their metabolic complexity.
It is clear for this review that there is still a lot that we don't know about corals, their health and there ability to metabolically adapt to changing conditions.
Reviewed paper-

Lesser, M. P. (2012). Using energetic budgets to assess the effects of environmental stress on corals: Are we measuring the right things? Coral Reefs, 32(1), 25–33. doi:10.1007/s00338-012-0993-

 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00338-012-0993-x