Sea urchin intestinal bacterial communities depend on seaweed diet and contain nitrogen-fixing symbionts.

ABSTRACT: Kelp deforestation by sea urchin grazing is a widespread phenomenon globally, with vast consequences for coastal ecosystems. The ability of sea urchins to survive on a kelp diet of poor nutritional quality is not well understood and bacterial communities in the sea urchin intestine may play an important role in digestion. A no-choice feeding experiment was conducted with the sea urchin Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis, offering three different seaweeds as diet, including the kelp Saccharina latissima. Starved sea urchins served as experimental control. Amplicons of the 16S rRNA gene were analyzed from fecal pellets. One dominant symbiont (Psychromonas marina) accounted for 44% of all sequence reads and was especially abundant in the sea urchins fed seaweed diets. The starved and field-cap

SUBMITTER: Bengtsson MM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11797059 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature