Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © Royal Society, 2005. This article is posted here by permission of
Royal Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published
in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 272 (2005): 1209-1216, doi:10.1098/rspb.2005.3082.
Description:
Symbioses profoundly affect the diversity of life, often through novel biochemical services that symbionts provide to their hosts. These biochemical services are typically nutritional enhancements and less commonly defensive, but rarely both simultaneously. On the coral reefs of Papua New Guinea, we discovered unique associations between marine isopod crustaceans (Santia spp.) and episymbiotic microbes. Transmission electron microscopy and pigment analyses show that episymbiont biomass is dominated by large (20–30μm) cyanobacterial cells. The isopods consume these photosymbionts and ‘cultivate’ them by inhabiting exposed sunlit substrates, a behaviour made possible by symbionts' production of a chemical defence that is repulsive to fishes. Molecular phylogenetic analyses demonstrated that the symbiotic microbial communities are diverse and probably dominated in terms of population size by bacteria and small unicellular Synechococcus-type cyanobacteria. Although largely unknown in the oceans, defensive symbioses probably promote marine biodiversity by allowing niche expansions into otherwise hostile environments.
Description:
This work was supported by an NSF Predoctoral Fellowship
awarded to J.B.W and a grant from the North Carolina
Biotechnology Center to N.L and Richard Manderville
(Wake Forest University).
Keywords:
Coral reefs
;
Chemical defence
;
Cyanobacteria
;
Defensive symbiosis
;
Marine isopods
;
Molecular phylogenetics
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
795647 bytes
Format:
application/pdf
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