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The geochemical and biological study of corals
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The gut bacterial community composition of sea urchins and potential linkages to host's feeding behavior in coral reefs
P-G3-06-S
Qiucui Yao* , Coral Reef Research Center of China, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China; Guangxi Laboratory on the Study of Coral Reefs in the South China Sea, Nanning 530004, China; School of Marine Sciences, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China; Key Lab of Beibu Gulf Environm Change and Resources Use Minist of Education, Guangxi Teachers Education University, Nanning 530001, China
Jiayuan Liang, Coral Reef Research Center of China, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China; Guangxi Laboratory on the Study of Coral Reefs in the South China Sea, Nanning 530004, China; School of Marine Sciences, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China
Kefu Yu, Coral Reef Research Center of China, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China; Guangxi Laboratory on the Study of Coral Reefs in the South China Sea, Nanning 530004, China; School of Marine Sciences, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China
Yinghui Wang, Coral Reef Research Center of China, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China; Guangxi Laboratory on the Study of Coral Reefs in the South China Sea, Nanning 530004, China; School of Marine Sciences, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China
Baoqing Hu, Key Lab of Beibu Gulf Environm Change and Resources Use Minist of Education, Guangxi Teachers Education University, Nanning 530001, China
Presenter Email: 380928778@qq.com |
| Sea urchins play an important role in maintaining the health and stability of coral reef ecosystem, but some species tend to ingest corals and erode their skeleton. At past decades, sea urchins, as corallivore and bioeroder, had led many coral reefs to degrade. Gut bacteria closely linked to host's feeding behavior, but their composition and influence on the corallivorous behavior of sea urchins had not been studied well in coral reefs. Here, 20 scrapers from four sea urchin species Stomopneustes variolaris, Diadema setosum, Echinothrix calamaris and Diadema antillarum and 20 browsers from one sea urchin species Tripneustes gratilla were collected from Luhuitou fringing reef, Sanya, China, to investigate their gut bacterial composition by High-throughput pyrosequencing. Diversity analysis showed that the gut bacterial diversity of sea urchin was significantly higher in browsers than scrapers. Propionigenium, Prolixibacter and Photobacterium were the dominant bacterial genera in all five studied sea urchin species. However, their total abundance was higher in scraper than browser, accounting for 69.69% and 43.54%, respectively. PCoA (the principal co-ordinates analysis) and ANOSIM (the analysis of similarity) showed that gut bacterial community composition was analogous between the scrapers but significantly different between scrapers and browsers, suggesting that host's feeding strategies was one of the main factors to shape the gut bacterial community of sea urchins. In addition, the functional composition of these bacteria predicted by PICRUSt showed that the mean relative abundances of lipid metabolism and amino acid metabolism were higher in browsers, while the carbohydrate and nucleotide metabolism were higher in scrapers. The evidence suggested that different between scrapers and browsers might be associated with the digestion of animal-based diet, suggested that the bacterial composition of sea urchins influenced on host's food degradation and food choice. Our study displayed a clear distinction of gut bacterial community and functional composition between scrapers and browsers. It highlighted that those distinction may interact with the feeding behaviors of sea urchins in coral reef, which in turn strongly impacted on the reef ecology. |
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