Abstract
In the aquatic environment, biofilms on solid surfaces are omnipresent. The outer body surface of marine organisms often represents a highly active interface between host and biofilm. Since biofilms on living surfaces have the capacity to affect the fluxes of information, energy, and matter across the host’s body surface, they have an important ecological potential to modulate the abiotic and biotic interactions of the host. Here we review existing evidence how marine epibiotic biofilms affect their hosts’ ecology by altering the properties of and processes across its outer surfaces. Biofilms have a huge potential to reduce its host’s access to light, gases, and/or nutrients and modulate the host’s interaction with further foulers, consumers, or pathogens. These effects of epibiotic biofilms may intensely interact with environmental conditions. The quality of a biofilm’s impact on the host may vary from detrimental to beneficial according to the identity of the epibiotic partners, the type of interaction considered, and prevailing environmental conditions. The review concludes with some unresolved but important questions and future perspectives.
Highlights
MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES ASSOCIATED WITH MACROORGANISMS IN THE SEA: ANTAGONISM, NEUTRALISM, SYNERGISM IN EPIBIOSIS In contrast to air, the ocean represents a benign environment for most living organisms: With the exception of some harsh marine environments, the means of physico-chemical properties are generally not far off the optimum of most species and their fluctuations are moderate, rarely exceeding biological tolerance limits
It is not surprising that any undefended surface is overgrown by microand macro-foulers within days or weeks. Such an uncontrolled biotic coverage of an organism’s body surface will have a multitude of, mostly detrimental, consequences for the basibiont: Increased weight and friction, impeded trans-epidermal exchanges, altered color, smell, and contour with multiple consequences. These proximate changes to the host due to epibiosis may lead to a loss of buoyancy, an impediment of motility, a hindrance to mating, or a substantial shift of interactions among species (e.g., Prescott, 1990; Dougherty and Russell, 2005; Wahl, 2008b) and is thought to be the selecting force behind the evolution of a variety of antifouling strategies
While the direct and indirect effects of macro-epibiosis, i.e., the colonization of a basibiont by macroscopic epibionts have been thoroughly studied, the consequences of epibiotic microbial fouling have received substantially less attention. The reasons for this asymmetry of investigative effort are obvious: The presence of epibiotic biofilms is less conspicuous, its constituents are not comprehensively described
Summary
HETEROKONTOPHYTA Dictyota bartayresiana Fucus vesiculosus Laminaria hyperborea Laminaria rodriguezii Saccharina latissima RHODOPHYTA Coralline crustose Delisea pulchra Delisea pulchra Gracilaria vermiculophylla Osmundaria volubilis Phyllophora crispa Porphyra yezoensis 3 spp. macroalgae 12 spp. macroalgae Unidentified turf algae. ECOLOGICAL ROLE OF EPIBIOTIC BACTERIA: MODULATION OF HOST-ENVIRONMENT INTERACTIONS The recent increase in studies of the phylogenetic diversity of bacterial communities associated with marine organisms starts to provide information on the presence and absence of specific taxa under various environmental conditions and on different hosts. It provides little information on the ecological function of these taxa.
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