W3 Seminar: Managing microbiomes for coral conservation

Details

Speaker:
Julie Meyer, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Soil, Water and Ecosystem Sciences, UF

Title:
Managing microbiomes for coral conservation: Lessons learned from the development of probiotic treatments for coral disease

Abstract:
Microbes drive global biogeochemical cycles and have profound impacts on their multicellular hosts, including ecosystem engineers like stony corals. Warming ocean temperatures, ocean deoxygenation, and disease all threaten the survival of coral reefs, but is it possible to use our understanding of beneficial host-associated microbes to mitigate the loss of coral cover? As part of a collaborative, multi-year intervention project, we developed and tested in situ probiotic treatments for stony coral tissue loss disease on Florida’s Coral Reef. Applying probiotic bacteria underwater in natural environments is unprecedented, especially for endangered and protected species like corals, which reflects the severity of this decade-long disease outbreak. This talk will provide an overview of the lessons we learned in the application of coral probiotics, including feasibility in the field, the effect of probiotics on coral survival, and how the coral microbiome responds to probiotic treatment.