Characterization of the Aquatic Microbiome Prior to, During and Following a Ninety-Percent Water Change in an Artificial Salt Water System
IAAAM 2015
William Van Bonn1*; Allen LaPointe1; Sean M. Gibbons2,3; Angel Frazier3; Jarrad Hampton-Marcell3,4; Jack Gilbert2,3,4,5,6,7
1A. Watson Armour III Center for Animal Health and Welfare, John G. Shedd Aquarium, Chicago, IL, USA; 2Graduate Program in Biophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA; 3Institute for Genomic and Systems Biology, Bioscience Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, USA; 4Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA; 5Department of Surgery, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA; 6Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA, USA; 7College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
Abstract
As part of our developing Aquarium Microbiome Project, the bacterial community composition and structure of water from an established teleost fish system was examined before, during, and after a major water change. The aim of this study was to explore the impact of such a water-change disturbance on the stability of the aquarium water microbiome. The diversity and evenness of the bacterial community significantly increased following a 90% water replacement, which was primarily influenced by a significant increase in the relative abundance of bacterial taxa related to four families. While the change in bacterial community structure was significant, it was slight, and was also weakly correlated with a change in the redox state of the water. Interestingly, there was a significant shift in the correlative network relationships between operational taxonomic units from before to after the water replacement. We suggest this increase is due to an increase in the stochasticity and range of shifting relative abundances for bacterial taxa, which is supported by an increase in the variance in community structure in the water samples following replacement.
This study illustrates the phenomenal power of contemporary molecular microbial ecology techniques and the ability to detect changes in aquatic microbial community structure with incredibly high resolution. These observations will inform future studies into manipulation of the microbiome by changing system environmental parameter values to optimize resident animal health.
Acknowledgements
We enthusiastically thank the Fishes department aquarists for coordination of sample collecting during the water change and the technicians of the Environmental Quality and Clinical Laboratories at Shedd Aquarium for sample collecting and processing.
* Presenting author