Abstract
For most reef-building corals, the establishment of symbiosis occurs via horizontal transmission, where juvenile coral recruits acquire their algal symbionts (family Symbiodiniaceae) from their surrounding environment post-settlement. This transmission strategy allows corals to interact with a diverse array of symbionts, potentially facilitating adaptation to the newly settled environment. We exposed aposymbiotic Pseudodiploria strigosa recruits from the Flower Garden Banks to natal reef sediment (C−S+), symbiotic adult coral fragments (C+S−), sediment and coral fragments (C+S+), or seawater controls (C−S−) and quantified rates of symbiont uptake and Symbiodiniaceae community composition within each recruit using metabarcoding of the ITS2 locus. The most rapid uptake was observed in C+S+ treatments, and this combination also led to the highest symbiont alpha diversity in recruits. While C−S+ treatments exhibited the next highest uptake rate, only one individual recruit successfully established symbiosis in the C+S− treatment, suggesting that sediment both serves as a direct symbiont source for coral recruits and promotes (or, potentially, mediates) transmission from adult coral colonies. In turn, presence of adult corals facilitated uptake from the sediment, perhaps via chemical signaling. Taken together, our results reinforce the key role of sediment in algal symbiont uptake by P. strigosa recruits and suggest that sediment plays a necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, role in the life cycle of algal Symbiodiniaceae symbionts.
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Acknowledgements
Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation Grant DEB-1054766 to M.V.M., a departmental graduate student start-up award from the Section of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin to S.W.D., and the PADI Foundation Award to S.W.D. In addition, the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary is acknowledged for boat time aboard the R/V Manta. We acknowledge Marie Strader for her confocal microscopy work and Galina Aglyamova for help in the molecular lab. Lastly, we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their critical feedback that greatly improved the manuscript.
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Supplemental Figure 1
Symbiodiniaceae uptake experimental design demonstrating the four different uptake treatments and the three replicate slides with settled P. strigosa corals (N = 16–55 recruits per slide) within each tank (3 tank systems for each uptake treatment). C−S+ = FGB natal reef sediment only, C+S− = Orbicella faveolata coral host fragment only, C+S+ = FGB natal reef sediment and O. faveolata coral host fragment, and C−S− = seawater control (PDF 251 kb)
Supplemental Figure 2
Mean temperature in a representative experimental tank through time. Black line indicates mean temperature and gray shading shows 95% confidence interval around that mean. Data were collected using Hobo data loggers (PDF 257 kb)
Supplemental Figure 3
ITS2 Symbiodiniaceae community library preparation. A. ITS amplicon for each sequenced coral adult and P. strigosa recruit. Cycle numbers ranged from 26 - 41 across samples (Supplemental Table S1). B. ITS2 amplicons alongside their no-template negative controls (black arrows) demonstrating that even under high cycle numbers (42 cycles) no amplification is observed in negative controls. Correlations between PCR cycle number and Shannon diversity (C.) and Simpson’s diversity (D.) across amplified recruit DNA (PDF 1093 kb)
Supplemental Table S1
Raw Amplicon Sequence Variant (ASV) counts (TXT 1600 kb)
Supplemental Table S2
Coral adult and recruit DNA sample ID’s and their associated uptake treatment tanks, raw 454 sequence numbers, dada2 filtered sequence numbers and total number of PCR cycles (PCR) ran for each sample to achieve a visual band on agarose gel (Supplementary Fig. 3A). Sample in bold was not included in downstream analyses due to low read depth. C−S+ = FGB natal reef sediment only, C+S− = Orbicella faveolata coral host fragment only, C+S+ = FGB natal reef sediment and O. faveolata coral host fragment, and C−S− = seawater control (DOCX 14 kb)
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Ali, A., Kriefall, N.G., Emery, L.E. et al. Recruit symbiosis establishment and Symbiodiniaceae composition influenced by adult corals and reef sediment. Coral Reefs 38, 405–415 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-019-01790-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-019-01790-z