Evaluating the effectiveness of field-based probiotic treatments for stony coral tissue loss disease in southeast Florida, USA

Kelly A Pitts^1*Mackenzie Scheuermann¹Jonathan S Lefcheck²Blake Ushijima³Natalie Danek¹E. Murphy McDonald¹Aaron R Milanese⁴Monica D Schul⁴Julie L Meyer⁴Kathryn A Toth¹Zachary Ferris¹Yesmarie De La Flor¹Thomas DeMarco¹Hunter K. G. Noren⁵Brian Keith Walker⁵Valerie J Paul^1*

• ¹Smithsonian Marine Station (SMS), Fort Pierce, United States
• ²Center for Environmental Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Cambridge, Maryland, United States
• ³Department of Biology and Marine Biology, College of Arts and Sciences, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, North Carolina, United States
• ⁴Department of Soil, Water, and Ecosystem Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States
• ⁵Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, Nova Southeastern University, Dania Beach, Florida, United States

Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) has spread throughout Florida’s Coral Reef, causing extensive mortality of over 30 species of reef-building corals, and has rapidly spread to many other countries and territories throughout the Caribbean. Current treatments for SCTLD, including a proprietary paste mixed with the antibiotic amoxicillin, do not provide protection from future infections and may select for antibiotic-resistant pathogenic bacteria. In contrast, beneficial microorganisms (i.e., probiotics), may directly treat or act as prophylactics for corals exposed to SCTLD. This study investigated the use of the bacterium Pseudoalteromonas sp. McH1-7, previously isolated from a SCTLD-resistant fragment of Montastraea cavernosa, as a potential probiotic treatment for SCTLD-infected M. cavernosa colonies in the wild. We developed and tested two probiotic deployment methods: (1) the injection of a probiotic in seawater suspension into a weighted bag placed over the coral to treat the whole colony; and (2) a sodium alginate-based paste that was applied directly to each disease lesion. After treatment, the disease progression of each colony was routinely monitored using three-dimensional photogrammetry over 2.5 years. Slurries of tissue and mucus samples were taken from healthy and diseased colonies before treatment, two weeks after treatment, and three months after treatment to identify possible shifts in bacterial and archaeal communities. McH1-7 successfully slowed SCTLD lesion progression for over 2.5 years following treatments when delivered using the whole-colony treatment technique. Our assessment of the microbiome following treatment showed that McH1-7 was effective without dominating bacterial communities among infected corals. In contrast, corals treated with the probiotic paste lost more tissue than corals treated with the control paste, indicating that the lesion-specific probiotic paste is not effective at stopping SCTLD. Probiotic inoculations via a whole-colony treatment technique may provide a path toward slowing the loss of reef-building corals due to SCTLD.