Microbiota assemblages of water, sediment, and intestine and their associations with environmental factors and shrimp physiological health

Abstract

Microorganisms play crucial roles in nutrient cycling, water quality maintenance, and farmed animal health. Increasing evidences have revealed a close association between unstable microbial environments and disease occurrences in aquaculture. Thereupon, we used high-throughput sequencing technology to comprehensively compare the bacterial communities of water, sediment, and intestine in mariculture ponds at the middle and late stages of Litopenaeus vannamei farming and analyzed whether changes of their microbiota assemblages were associated with environmental factors and shrimp physiological health. Results showed that bacterial community structures were significantly distinct among water, sediment, and intestine; meanwhile, the relative abundances of intestinal dominant taxa were significantly changed between different rearing stages. Compared with intestine and water, shrimp intestine and sediment had a similar profile of the dominant bacterial genera by cluster analysis, and the observed species, diversity indexes, and shared OTUs of bacterial communities in intestine and sediment were simultaneously increased after shrimp were farmed for 90 days. These results reflected a closer relationship between microbiotas in sediment and intestine, which was further proved by nonmetric multidimensional scaling analysis. However, bacterial communities in water, sediment, and intestine responded differently to environmental variables by redundancy and correlation analysis. More importantly, shrimp physiological parameters were closely associated with bacterial variations in the gut and/or ambient, especially the gut microbiota owning significantly high levels of predicted functional pathways involved in disease emergence. These findings may greatly add to our understanding of the microbiota characteristics of the shrimp pond ecosystem and the complex interactions among shrimp, ambient microflora, and environmental variables.

Intestine Bacterial Community Composition of Shrimp Varies Under Low- and High-Salinity Culture Conditions

“…The intestine microbiota of shrimp is increasingly recognized to facilitate host health, and its influencing factors have been extensively studied. To the best of our knowledge, the intestine microbiota of shrimp is not only affected by biotic factors (Burns et al, 2016;Dai et al, 2017;Zeng et al, 2017) but also by abiotic factors (e.g., salinity and temperature) (Zhang et al, 2016;Huang et al, 2018). Our study reinforced the evidence that the shrimp intestine bacterial communities are influenced by the salinity of rearing water, with marked variations observed of FIGURE 6 | Ecological process analyses on shrimp intestine bacterial assembly in the LS and HS groups.…”

“…So far, research into the effects of abiotic factors on the intestine microbiota of aquatic animals has just begun. Some studies have shown that the intestine microbiota of aquatic animals is significantly affected by the salinity, ammonia, and temperature of rearing water (Sullam et al, 2012;Cornejo-Granados et al, 2018;Huang et al, 2018). Aquatic animals live in the water habitat with environmental conditions (e.g., salinity, temperature) are constantly experience changes, and whether these abiotic factors can influence on host intestine microbiota, causing further adverse effects on host health status, remains unknown.…”

BALOs Improved Gut Microbiota Health in Postlarval Shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) After Being Subjected to Salinity Reduction Treatment

“…Alphaproteobacteria (such as Rhodobacterales and Rhizobiales) and Planctomycetales are associated with healthy shrimp Xiong et al, 2017) and are less abundant in diseased (Zhu et al, 2016;Xiong et al, 2017) or significantly less in slow growth ones (p < 0.01) . As beneficial bacteria, Rhodobacteraceae have been applied in shrimp aquaculture for their abilities to degrade organic compounds in ponds (Huang F. et al, 2018).…”

Feed Types Driven Differentiation of Microbial Community and Functionality in Marine Integrated Multitrophic Aquaculture System

“…Similar microbial community composition was detected between water, sediment and animal gut microbiota [15,16]. Hence, the water and sediment microbiota may serve as a source of the gut microbiota of farmed animals, which influences animal health and growth performance [17,18].…”