ORCID

0000-0002-3901-179X (Dobbs)

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

DOI

10.1002/ece3.2467

Publication Title

Ecology and Evolution

Volume

6

Issue

20

Pages

7397-7408

Abstract

Bivalves process large volumes of water, leading to their accumulation of bacteria, including potential human pathogens (e.g., vibrios). These bacteria are captured at low efficiencies when freely suspended in the water column, but they also attach to marine aggregates, which are captured with near 100% efficiency. For this reason, and because they are often enriched with heterotrophic bacteria, marine aggregates have been hypothesized to function as important transporters of bacteria into bivalves. The relative contribution of aggregates and unattached bacteria to the accumulation of these cells, however, is unknown. We developed an agent-based model to simulate accumulation of vibrio-type bacteria in oysters. Simulations were conducted over a realistic range of concentrations of bacteria and aggregates and incorporated the dependence of pseudofeces production on particulate matter. The model shows that the contribution of aggregate-attached bacteria depends strongly on the unattached bacteria, which form the colonization pool for aggregates and are directly captured by the simulated oysters. The concentration of aggregates is also important, but its effect depends on the concentration of unattached bacteria. At high bacterial concentrations, aggregates contribute the majority of bacteria in the oysters. At low concentrations of unattached bacteria, aggregates have a neutral or even a slightly negative effect on bacterial accumulation. These results provide the first evidence suggesting that the concentration of aggregates could influence uptake of pathogenic bacteria in bivalves and show that the tendency of a bacterial species to remain attached to aggregates is a key factor for understanding species-specific accumulation.

Rights

© 2016 The Authors.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Data Availability

Article states: "Code and data available at Dryad repository: http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.m56c1."

Original Publication Citation

Kramer, A.M., Ward, J.E., Dobbs, F.C., Pierce, M.L., & Drake, J.M. (2016). The contribution of marine aggregate-associated bacteria to the accumulation of pathogenic bacteria in oysters: An agent-based model. Ecology and Evolution, 6(20), 7397-7408. doi: 10.1002/ece3.2467

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