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Consumer feces impact coral health in guild-specific ways
Summary
Researchers tested the effect of fresh and heat-killed feces from corallivorous and grazer/detritivorous fish on coral health, finding that fresh grazer/detritivore feces caused detrimental effects while corallivore feces did not, implicating live microbiota in grazer feces as the harmful agent. The study revealed that consumer microbiota can impact coral health in guild-specific ways, with bacterial diversity varying across ten fish species reflecting their ecological roles.
Abstract Microbiota from consumer feces can impact resource species in guild-specific ways. We tested the effect of fresh and heat-killed feces from corallivorous (coral-eating) and grazer/detritivorous fish on coral health and found that fresh grazer/detritivore feces, but not fresh corallivore feces, affected coral health in detrimental ways compared to heat-killed feces, suggesting that microbiota in grazer/detritivore feces were harmful. Bacterial diversity across 10 fish species suggests our experimental findings are generalizable to consumer guild: corallivore feces contained more coral-associated bacteria, and lower abundances of the coral pathogen, Vibrio coralliilyticus . These findings recontextualize the ecological roles of consumers on coral reefs: although herbivores support coral dominance through removal of algal competitors, they also disperse coral pathogens. Corallivore predation can wound corals, yet their feces contain potentially beneficial coral-associated bacteria, supporting the hypothesized role of corallivores in coral symbiont dispersal. Such consumer-mediated microbial dispersal as demonstrated here has broad implications for environmental management.
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