Network Analysis Reveals Species-Specific Organization of Microbial Communities in Four Co-Occurring Elasmobranch Species along the Georgia Coast
Date
2024-01-15
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Fishes
Abstract
Comparing co-occurring species may provide insights into how aspects of ecology may play a role in influencing their microbial communities. During the 2019 commercial shrimp trawl season off coastal Georgia, swabs of skin, gills, cloaca, and gut were taken for three species of batoids (Butterfly Ray, Bluntnose Stingray, and Atlantic Stingray) and one shark species (Atlantic Sharpnose) for high-throughput sequencing of the V4 region of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene. White muscle was analyzed for stable isotopes (δ13C and δ15N) to evaluate potential niche overlap in these four sympatric mesopredators. Significant differences were found in both δ13C and δ15N signatures across species, suggesting a degree of resource partitioning. When examined within tissue type, the host species had a weak effect on β-diversity for cloaca and skin, with no differences found for gill and gut samples. However, network analysis metrics demonstrated a stronger species-specific effect and distinct microbial community relationships were apparent between the shark and batoids, with the former having tighter networks for both internally- and externally-influenced tissues (gut/cloaca and skin/gills, respectively). Despite overlapping habitat use, species’ microbiomes differed in their organizational structuring that paralleled differences in stable isotope results, suggesting a mediating role of species-specific ecology on bacterial microbiomes.
Description
This article was originally published in Fishes. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/fishes9010034. © 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords
shark, stingray, ecology, microbiome, network analysis
Citation
Lyons, Kady, Christine N. Bedore, Aaron B. Carlisle, Lauren Moniz, Timothy L. Odom, Rokeya Ahmed, Stephen E. Greiman, and Ryan M. Freedman. 2024. "Network Analysis Reveals Species-Specific Organization of Microbial Communities in Four Co-Occurring Elasmobranch Species along the Georgia Coast" Fishes 9, no. 1: 34. https://doi.org/10.3390/fishes9010034