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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Aquac.
Sec. Disease and Health Management
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/faquc.2024.1427405
This article is part of the Research Topic Aquatic Animal Health and Epidemiology: Disease Surveillance, Prevention and Control View all 5 articles

Microbial community structure variability over the development of healthy and underperforming oyster larval hatchery broods. Authors

Provisionally accepted
Jacob A. Cram Jacob A. Cram *Alexandra J. McCarty Alexandra J. McCarty Stacey M. Willey Stacey M. Willey Stephanie T. Alexander Stephanie T. Alexander
  • Horn Point Laboratory, Center for Environmental Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Cambridge, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Hatcheries nationwide suffer from unexplained acute production failures, termed crashes. The microbiota of oysters relates to larval health with previous studies showing that some bacterial species have positive and others negative effects on oyster health. To investigate microbial correlates of crashes, we collected samples from every batch of oyster larvae (Crassostrea virginica) produced by the Horn Point Laboratory Oyster Hatchery since 2021 and analyzed the microbiota of 15 of those batches over their duration in the hatchery, from age of 3 to 5 days until either harvest or complete die off of the batch. Across events, die-offs generally became evident at or after six days of age. We found that the microbiota of oyster larvae appears to respond to die-off events with crashed batches having fundamentally different microbiota than good batches at age 7 to 9 and 9 to 12 days. Crashed batches were often taken over by microeukaryotes and bacterial taxa from the Protobacteria and Bacteroidetes phyla. However, this presumably opportunistic community differed between batches. Observed Vibrio species level groups did not appear to be oyster pathogens and appeared to respond to, rather than precede, crashes.The microbiota of 3 to 5 day old larvae were statistically related to whether a die-off occured later in the larval batches' life, only when the taxa were first agglomerated to family level. The detection of two microbial species not previously known to associate with oysters, along with an increased presence of Dinophyceae, predominantly the toxin-producing Gyrodinium jinhaense, in 3 to 5 day old oyster larvae was statistically linked with subsequent batch crashes.This study suggests that the health of larval oysters shapes their microbiome. Conversely, it provides hints that the microbiome of larvae, and perhaps harmful algae, may drive hatchery crashes.

    Keywords: oyster, microbiome, unexplained die-offs, harmful algae, Amplicon sequencing

    Received: 03 May 2024; Accepted: 26 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Cram, McCarty, Willey and Alexander. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jacob A. Cram, Horn Point Laboratory, Center for Environmental Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Cambridge, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.