Jellyfish Life Stages Shape Associated Microbial Communities, While a Core Microbiome Is Maintained Across All

Abstract

The key to 650 million years of evolutionary success in jellyfish is adaptability: with alternating benthic and pelagic generations, sexual and asexual reproductive modes, multitudes of body forms and a cosmopolitan distribution, jellyfish are likely to have established a plenitude of microbial associations. Here we explored bacterial assemblages in the scyphozoan jellyfish Chrysaora plocamia (Lesson 1832). Life stages involved in propagation through cyst formation, i.e., the mother polyp, its dormant cysts (podocysts), and polyps recently excysted (excysts) from podocysts – were investigated. Associated bacterial assemblages were assessed using MiSeq Illumina paired-end tag sequencing of the V1V2 region of the 16S rRNA gene. A microbial core-community was identified as present through all investigated life stages, including bacteria with closest relatives known to be key drivers of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur cycling. Moreover, the fact that half of C. plocamia’s core bacteria were also present in life stages of the jellyfish Aurelia aurita, suggests that this bacterial community might represent an intrinsic characteristic of scyphozoan jellyfish, contributing to their evolutionary success.

Bacterial communities associated with scyphomedusae at Helgoland Roads

“…We assume that our results cannot be extrapolated to other jellyfish species; hence, it is very important to verify our results with regard to other jellyfish species. As Lee et al (2018) proposed, the bacterial community presents an intrinsic characteristic of scyphozoan jellyfish. There is a need for further studies addressing also an in-depth DNA sequencing analyses of the accompanying BC in order to better understand species-specificity of bacterial communities as well as function and composition of bacterial communities associated with jellyfish.…”

“…It was reported that half core bacteria of Chrysaora plocamia were also present in life stages of the jellyfish A. aurita. This might suggest that bacterial community represent an intrinsic characteristic of scyphozoan jellyfish, contributing to their evolutionary success (Lee et al 2018). AMPs are known to be strong tools of the innate immune system that are often secreted in response to external stimulation (Bosch 2013).…”

Characterization of the Gut Microbiota of the Antarctic Heart Urchin (Spatangoida) Abatus agassizii

“…In contrast with González-Aravena et al (2016) who found the microbiota composition of the regular Antarctic sea-urchin Sterechinus neumayerii dominated by Alphaproteobacteria and Flavobacteria and relatively similar to the seawater's one, we noticed a shift in the dominant class of the gut content microbiota of A. agassizii with a marked enrichment in Plantomycetacia mostly represented by the Blastopirellula genus (20% of the Planctomycetes sequences). The Planctomycetes phylum (including the Planctomycetacia) has been observed at various abundances in several marine microbiotas, such as sponges (Taylor et al, 2013;Rodriguez-Marconi et al, 2015), tubeworms (Medina-Silva et al, 2018), jellyfish (Lee et al, 2018), macroalgae (Bengtsson and Øvreås, 2010) and regular sea urchins (Hakim et al, 2016). However, such a predominance has never been reported so far in marine invertebrates.…”

The Diversity of the Endobiotic Bacterial Communities in the Four Jellyfish Species

“…These blooms are reported to be linked to overfishing, climate change, and eutrophication, leading to the damage to the marine ecosystems by affecting the planktonic food web (Viver et al 2017). Meanwhile, with the considerable increase in jellyfish swarms in coastal areas, the number of victims stung by jellyfish, including swimmers, fishermen and divers, has consequently been increasing (Cleary et al 2016;Lee et al 2018).…”