Aquarium microbiome response to ninety-percent system water change: Clues to microbiome management.

William Van Bonn,Sean M Gibbons,Jack Gilbert,Jarrad Hampton-Marcell,Allen Lapointe,Angel Frazier

doi:10.1002/zoo.21220

Abstract

The bacterial community composition and structure of water from an established teleost fish system was examined before, during and after a major water change 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 the 90% water replacement. While the change in bacterial community structure was significant, it was slight, and was also weakly correlated with changes in physicochemical parameters. 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 shift in network structure is due to the turnover of many taxa during the course of water replacement. These observations will inform future studies into manipulation of the microbiome by changing system environmental parameter values to optimize resident animal health.

Highlights

The microbial communities associated with animals and their environs have been significantly associated with numerous disease states, as well as physiological and neurological conditions; and a rapidly growing body of literature highlights causative relationships between changes in the microbiome and host health (Balter, 2012)
Mean hourly physiochemical parameter values for the system captured by the data logger, prior to, during and after the water change are presented as Table 1
To explore how the microbial community changed during the manipulation, a total of 1,139,278 sequences were generated from 44 samples

Summary

Introduction

The microbial communities associated with animals and their environs have been significantly associated with numerous disease states, as well as physiological and neurological conditions; and a rapidly growing body of literature highlights causative relationships between changes in the microbiome and host health (Balter, 2012). Antibiotic therapy, and other antimicrobial activities have been linked to multiple health problems, which have become prevalent in Western societies; including asthma, allergies, and other inappropriate immune responses, even several behavioral disorders (Okada et al, 2010). The water in aquatic systems housing animals supports a massive array of microbes (Kramer et al, 2013). Preliminary evidence strongly suggests the aquatic microbiome influences the immune responsiveness of resident white whales in managed systems (Spoon and Romano, 2012; Van Bonn unpublished data).

Methods

Results

Conclusion