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Shift in bacterial taxa precedes morphological plasticity in a larval echinoid

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Abstract

Morphological plasticity is an adaptive response to heterogenous environments when a fitness advantage is conferred. Larval sea urchins, for example, are hypothesized to increase individual fitness in dilute feeding environments by elongating their feeding structure relative to their body size. Morphological plasticity for larval sea urchins is also coupled with significant shifts in the associated bacterial community, but whether this change to the associated microbiota occurs before, during, or following the expression of morphological plasticity is unclear. Using the sea urchin Lytechinus variegatus, we compare the temporal pattern of the microbial community and how it relates to the timing of morphological plasticity for larvae cultured in different food concentrations. From prefeeding through the expression of morphological plasticity, we observed that the microbiota associated with L. variegatus larvae exhibit a four-stage successional pattern, where changes in this community shift prior to the expression of the environment-specific morphology. The high food treatment, which results in the short-arm phenotype, deviated from the microbial trajectory of larval siblings prior to measurable morphological plasticity. These data suggest that a holobiont may exhibit shifts in the associated bacterial community corresponding with variation in the feeding environment that could occur in anticipation of or prior to morphological plasticity.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Daniel Rittschof (Duke Univ.) for welcoming this project into his laboratory; Beatriz Orihuela (Duke Univ.) for endless logistical assistance; Josh Osterberg (Duke Univ.) for collecting adult urchins; Karen Lopez (UNC Charlotte) for technical assistance with sequencing; Daniel Janies (UNC Charlotte) for sequencing resources; Justin McAlister (College of the Holy Cross) and Jason Hodin (Univ. Washington) for discussions on morphological plasticity in echinoid larvae; and the two reviewers for providing critical feedback to an earlier version of this manuscript.

Funding

This work was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to TJC, a Human Frontier Science Program Award to AMR (RGY0079/2016), and a North Carolina Sea Grant award to AMR and TJC (2016-R/MG-1604).

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  1. Department of Biological Sciences, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Tyler J. Carrier & Adam M. Reitzel

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  1. Tyler J. Carrier
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Correspondence to Tyler J. Carrier.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. We do, however, note that a preprint of this manuscript is available on bioRxiv (see, Carrier and Reitzel 2019b).

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Carrier, T.J., Reitzel, A.M. Shift in bacterial taxa precedes morphological plasticity in a larval echinoid. Mar Biol 166, 164 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-019-3613-2

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