Aquabiomics

[victoly]

I know a few of us have sent off for microbiome testing by Eli Meyer at aquabiomics. I thought it might be cool to share them all in one place and discuss results. 

Aquabiomics 20201019.pdf

[victoly]

@FarmerTy@Gig 'em @ NDstructible

[victoly]

Here's my followup email from Eli:

 

I'm writing to follow up personally on this automated email, and share my perspective on your reports. I'm sorry the delay getting these to you, and hope you had a good Thanksgiving in the meantime!

 

Lets start with Diversity. The community in your tank was more diverse than the majority of tanks I've sampled, at the 85th percentile. You're probably familiar with the debates about the value of microbial diversity in the hobby. I consider high diversity a positive feature because as you are probably aware, diversity is associated with productivity and resilience in a variety of ecosystems including coral reefs. More specifically, healthy coral reefs show higher microbial diversity than degraded coral reefs. So from this perspective, this is a positive finding. 

 

Next Balance. Your balance score is even higher than the raw number appears -- this is actually the 99th percentile. In other words, the community in your tank is exceptionally similar to the 'typical' profile (the average levels across all healthy tanks in my database). 

 

So both of these primary scores are very high - your tank has a very diverse and normal community. That will make this section of the email much briefer than usual! Most tanks deviate in some way from the typical community. 

 

The community barplots (part 2) show more details about this community. Its useful to focus on the most abundant families from the typical community, then locate these in the barplot for your sample. You can see that all five of the most abundant families from the typical community are also readily visible in your sample. 

 

Nitrifying microbes - your sample had slightly low levels of ammonia oxidizing microbes (AOM), in the bottom half of the typical range. In your tank, like most, these were entirely composed of Archaea (family Cenarchaeaceae) rather than Bacteria.

 

However, there were no detectable nitrite-oxidizing bacteria (NOB). This is actually not too unusual, notice that the >10% of tanks lack detectable NOB. These populations typically increase or decrease in proportion to the levels of the AOM that feed them, so its not unusual to see undetectable NOB when you have low AOM. 

 

Usually when we see this, there are reasonable explanations for competition for Nitrogen, such as a macro algae refugium. But I don't see any such thing in your tank. I wonder whether in your system, the AOM and NOB populations have become very localized on sulfur denitrator. We should sample that directly! I think you're the first client I've had that used this system. 

 

Happily, your tank lacked any signal from known bacterial pathogens of fish or corals. I also checked for the bacteria associated with the Caribbean coral disease SCTLD, but found no evidence of these either. 

 

So overall some very good evidence of a diverse and normal microbiome in your aquarium. I remain interested in getting a sample of your denitrator if possible so we can explore whats living there directly. 

 

I hope this analysis and my explanation have been useful. I'd be happy to discuss further, and would be curious to read your thoughts about this report based on your knowledge of the tanks involved. 

[Timfish]

Great idea!  It's exciting to see DNA testing finally available to reef aquarists.  After years of not having my own system I'm building my own and will be getting their subscription service.  It will be interesting to see how the bacteria develop and change as it matures.