Hi everyone. I'm Brian with the Scientist in Every Florida School
program and in this edition of Science Segments i'm excited to connect you to a
scientist to help you learn about symbiotic relationships. Who are you and
what is your title? Hey Brian. My name is Roy Yanong and I'm actually a
professor and extension veterinarian based out of the tropical aquaculture
lab. I've got a drone shot of our facility right here they are in Ruskin.
We do a lot of work with fish farmers and a lot of natural resource agencies
and actually let me share a screen real quick. This is again a little overhead
shot of our lab. We've got a lot of different ponds here. We do a lot of work
with again with aquaculture in the state of Florida. There's a lot of fish farmers
in the area and we help them in all sorts of ways. My area is fish health and
disease. We also work with fish and wildlife. One of the big things I do is I
run a diagnostic lab if you guys see here I've got some sick fish on there
different things we do to check for bacteria and look for parasites you know
we'll talk a little bit about parasitism on in the next little section but we do
a lot of work with trying to help the farmer solve any health or disease
issues and also programs to maybe teach them as well as students and others
about fish health and fish health management. One of the things for example
people probably don't think about we've actually worked with farms to
vaccinate their fish. You know fish get a disease and we want to try to prevent
that disease. Some of these diseases we can actually develop a vaccine for with
some of my colleagues and so this was a tilapia facility that we did a
vaccine for. We vaccinated about 8,000 fish which is a lot of fish by hand.
You can see one of my students there doing their work there. I also have done some
consulting out of the country so this is me working with some folks in the
Caribbean in the Dominican Republic where they were having some problems
with these guys. Some of you may recognize Cobia they're a big game fish
in and around Florida as well as in other parts of the world. They were
actually breeding them for food and you can see this guy hopefully you can see
he's got kind of a white area around his eyes his gills look
all messed up so he was really sick. They were losing a lot of them so I actually
flew over there. I helped them with their problem there. We also have done
surgeries. Lots of things you people probably don't think about you can do
with fish so that's kind of a little bit of intro to what I do. A lot of my
research is aimed at helping those folks as well as folks in natural resource and
you know including some of the people working with corals and sea urchins etc
so a little bit of a mix from my own main focuses with fish. Can you briefly
describe some of the relationships among organisms? Sure, so I thought maybe a
little bit of charting here will help you guys. There's definitely a lot
of different other relationships. These are some of the main ones and the way I
kind of like to think about it is like who's gonna win? You've got two organisms
one is maybe gonna affect the other maybe not one may win and one may lose
and so maybe that's that's a way of looking at it. We've got five different
types of interactions we're going to talk about: mutualism, commensalism,
competition, parasitism here and predation so again there's other sort of
relationships but these are the five we'll focus on so when we talk about
these I want you to think about who's winning, who's losing or is it kind of
neutral so I've got kind of beneficial which would be you know which which one
is winning detrimental you know which one is losing and red on the bottom and
then here in the middle it's kind of neutral the organisms really not winning
or losing so let's start with the first one mutualism. So in mutualism both of
them win so really important one people are familiar with. Actually let's go back
here is the importance of the honeybee.
Everybody knows honeybees are really critical to both farmers as well as just
natural resource ecology. They pollinate all sorts of plants including crops.
They're really important for you know that function alone and they're
really really really important so there's a lot of issues with the
honeybees at this stage but they benefit by getting food from the from the
flowers that they're eventually pollinating but they're also helping the
plants by pollinating and causing seed production etc so that's a
mutualistic interaction. The slide I had before is coral. Some of you may be
familiar with the fact that coral are actually two organisms kind of tied
together so I've got a kind of a little cartoon of a coral here we're taking a
little circle section blow it up and then showing you sort of what's going on
the edge of the coral so you've got these coral polyps. They're kind of like
little anemones but because coral are colonial they have all these sort of
polyps that are living together and interacting with each other.
Part of these corals are gonna have different skin layers or
they're comprised of different skin layers and one of those skin layers they
have these algae essentially called zooxanthellae and these zooxanthellae
are one celled algae. They're really important to the coral because they will
provide the coral provides nutrients that the algae can use to make sugars and
other things that then the coral can use so that's again another mutualistic and
for Florida really important relationship that you all should be
aware of so two examples of mutualism. Alright let's talk about commensalism
now. So commensalism we can consider one of the organisms is winning and the
other is not winning or losing. Just kind of neutral and I have a really a pretty
popular example everybody knows about. Cattle egrets. We got cattle egrets and
cattle all over Florida. You see cattle egrets they're kind of
just hanging out on top of one of the cattle but what the cattle egrets do is
when the cattle are kind of grazing and disturbing any of the
substrate or grass they're gonna be allowing some of these insects and other
things to sort of start moving around and then the cattle egrets will go and
sort of eat and feed on those things that are getting disrupted by the
movements of the cattle and so you can see that of course the cattle egrets are
getting food but the cattle is really not affecting them one way or another.
They're sort of just kind of there so that is a commensal relationship with
the cattle being kind of a neutral party and the cattle egret being the
beneficiary or the one that's winning. Alright so the third kind of
relationship were going to talk about is competition and you guys everyone's
familiar with competition. You're competing in sports. You know usually you
know people putting a lot of effort into it. With animals it's kind of a similar
situation here and my example here are two important fish in Florida. One of
them is the largemouth bass which you can see there on the upper left and the
other is the peacock bass which is actually an intended and intentional
introduction by a Florida Fish and Wildlife into South Florida because it's
a really good game fish. They put it into canals which don't really have normal
kind of populations of fish you know they're a man-made and they've become a
really important sport fish. Now if you these two are in the same water they're
going to be competing for the same prey items and potentially same you know
other resources that are important so I put a little bluegill here in the middle
and so the competition kind of overall big picture wise we sort of consider
them both to sort of lose because they both have to put a lot of energy into
fighting or to you know to the to the struggle essentially. Obviously one of
them is going to get the fish but you know the other one they get it next time
so it's not necessarily like a lose but they are losing into a
degree because they're putting a lot of effort into the resource and they're not
just able to use it right away. Alright so the next is parasitism. everyone's
kind of familiar with parasites. You know your dog or cat can get fleas. You
know people get tapeworms. You know not everybody but some people
so parasites is a concept you're probably familiar with. I'm going to show
you a parasite that we deal with with fish farmers and in other and even in
actual natural water bodies because these parasites can affect other
species of fish in Florida as well and this is called the fish louse. So this is
a case I had many years ago. Holding up a koi here. If you're not familiar with koi
they're related to goldfish. You might be able to see all these little tiny kind
of greenish but they're sort of clear little dots all over. This koi had
literally hundreds and hundreds of this which is known as a fish louse. I kind of
blew up the picture here. You can see they're a little bit
transparent but essentially what these things are doing are taking like a
little needle-like extension of their mouth sticking it in sucking juices out
of the fish so they're parasitizing basically getting nutrients from the
fish whereas the fish of course is a loser in all this because it's getting
its life basically sucked out of it so in this case the parasite is the winner
and then the fish is the loser so there's one winner and one loser.
Alright and then the last one we're going to talk about is predation. Everyone's
pretty familiar with predation as well but it is you know officially a
relationship between organisms. One predator and one prey. I'm gonna talk
about another kind of Florida related scenario here
and this is the Goliath Grouper. Formally known as the Jew fish. The Goliath
Grouper and crustaceans as well as fish I used a crab here as our crustacean or
our prey so the grouper as many of you probably know can get really huge. They
can get really really really large. They eat all sorts of things including
octopus and fish and crustaceans like crabs and so as you can imagine really
really big fish little tiny crab there. It's gonna be eating that crab and you
have predation is pretty much a win for the grouper and a loss for the crab
except that the crab dies so with predation and you know real predation
one organism typically is gonna die as a result and so that's probably like the
ultimate loss I guess you can consider that so kind of in a little bit of a
summary here we talked about mutualism where you've got two wins. Bees and a lot
of the plants and flowers and crops both win.
Corals with those one celled algae or zooxanthellae also both win. Commensal we
had the cattle egret and the cattle so the cattle egret gets food the cattle it
doesn't really care. It's just moving around. Competition even though one of
the fish is gonna win at least food or maybe even shelter etc there is kind of
a loss overall because they both have to put a lot of energy into doing
that. Parasitism the parasite is getting nutrients
from the host but the host in this case the koi loses and then in predation of
course our Goliath Grouper wins because it gets food. The poor crab loses because
it gets eaten so that's hopefully a little bit of a summary and you guys can
kind of get a better understanding of what all those terms mean. Thank you Dr.
Yanong and thank you all so much for watching. We will see you next time.