- Hi guys and girls, I'm ReefMan,
and this week we're gonna talk about reef probiotics,
and specifically a paper that I found that
actually was published in December of 2018.
The paper is titled Marine Probiotics:
Increasing coral resistance to bleaching
through microbiome manipulation.
And what that really means is
you know how coral is bleaching in the ocean
because of pollution and
warming ocean water, well,
the new sort of idea
that these people are proposing
is maybe we can come up with a probiotic mixture
different bacteria that we can add to coral reefs
that will help them resist and recover
from warming water and bleaching.
So, it's a very interesting paper,
there's a link in the description to it.
I'd recommend checking it out.
But basically it raises the point that
maybe we can come up with a group of bacteria
that we could dose to coral that would make them
more resilient to disease and more resilient
to changing parameters.
Which I think is directly applicable to our own tanks.
Right, because our tanks have fluctuating water quality,
and fluctuating temperature compared to the ocean,
and certainly we have disease in our tanks.
You don't think of coral as being disease-prone,
but you may have heard of STN, RTN, those kinds of things,
rapid tissue necrosis,
you know, it doesn't just disappear overnight,
it is an infection of our coral
though we don't know necessarily what agent is causing it.
So if we could come up with a probiotic solution
to these things, I think it could be really
sort of a game changer for treating disease
and just general coral health in our aquariums.
So what this group of scientists did
was take three different pocillopora colonies
that had been raised in aquariums
and they frag them up into 24 different
little 3 centimeter colonies.
Now, they call these not frags, they called them nubbins,
which I think is great, I think we should call frags
nubbins instead, coral nubbins instead of frags.
So they had nubbins of this pocillopora coral
and what they did was they take three samples
because they had three original colonies.
They ground them up into a paste,
skeleton and everything,
and then they took those and they spread them
in Petrie dishes with marine agar
which is just a growth media that
represents sort of natural marine conditions
that bacteria might like.
So they spread the paste out onto these Petrie dishes
and they grew whatever would grow.
They found that a bunch of stuff as you might imagine
grows and from that they looked and they took
samples of the main bacterial colonies.
Then they ran some tests against them.
Would they resist disease if you introduced
another kind of pathogenic bacteria?
They used vibirio in the
in the paper,
they used a certain species of vibirio that infects
these coral in the wild,
and they found that some of the bacteria that was naturally
on the coral does actually resist disease.
And they found that some of it grew at higher temperatures,
some of it resisted different changes in water quality,
maybe higher nitrates and the bacteria did well.
So they took all the ones that had
favorable characteristics like that,
and they just grew those specific strains of bacteria.
They don't identify what those bacteria are,
but they grew them in the lab
and created a bacterial soup,
a probiotic mixture
of these bacteria that they could use in their experiments.
So they broke their coral nubbins
into four different sections
and of course it's a scientific experiment
so you need the control group,
so one of them is just a control,
the other one they were going to
just do the probiotic mixture,
another one they were going to
just introduce the pathogen, vibirio,
a certain species of vibirio,
and then another one they were going to
introduce the pathogen and also the probiotics
and see what happened.
So they were also studying the changing climate
and ocean warming, so on all the tanks
they raised the temperature from 24 degrees
to 30 degrees celsius
just to simulate a warming ocean and stress the coral.
But then as I mentioned they introduced the pathogen,
they introduced the probiotic mixtures,
and they did this actually by taking the coral
out of the tank, putting the mixture on it,
and then putting it back into the tank.
So it's not really like just adding a
cup of AcroPower to your tank and hoping for the best.
It was really more targeted than that.
So they added this and then they found that
indeed the probiotic mixture does impact the coral health
in a positive way.
The control group they found that those corals
didn't do so well, they lightened in color.
The group that just had the pathogen
lightened in color, and some of it I think even died.
The group that had the pathogen and the probiotics
actually did best of all.
They don't know exactly why that group did so well,
but introducing the pathogen
and then a day later introducing the probiotic
somehow made the coral actually net out at doing better
than just the probiotics alone.
But the probiotics alone also did better
than the control group.
So it was really a solid result, I think.
Were the probiotics that they were using
did have a measurable impact on the health of the coral
in their experiment.
And I think we could do something similar in our tanks.
If you were so inclined, the paper
has very detailed directions on how they did
all of their studies so that other scientists
can reproduce the results if they want,
but it also means that you could reproduce them at home
I think pretty easily if you were inclined to do so.
I think if you did want to do that
it would be really interesting to you know,
keep meticulous documents of what you are doing
and where you get the source materials and all that
kind of stuff so that other people maybe could
follow in your shoes
but I think its' an untapped market that is available
to somebody out there for marine aquariums.
There is very few kind of probiotic things on the market
right now.
There's a lot of bacterial things on the market,
everything from MicroBacter to ProdBio to maybe even
the Vibrant that we use for algae.
Those are all at least suspected to be bacterial
products that we add to our tank to achieve an outcome
but they're all things like get rid of your algae,
get rid of your nitrates, get rid of your phosphates.
It's not things geared towards
making your coral more healthy.
I use AcroPower, it's not a bacterial thing,
it's a, I mean they claim it is a blend of amino acids
that is utilized by coral and I use this
for mostly just coloration and I think that it does help,
but it's not a bacterial product, so I'd be really
interested to see if any of you happen to know
of a really coral targeted bacterial product
that's on the market.
Something that you would call a probiotic.
Like you would get for yourself in yogurt
or like you would get for your fish
if you were doing commercial fish farming there is
probiotics you can use for fish health.
There's probiotics for horticultural things
for like growing roots better.
All sorts of industries have it, but not coral.
So it's an interesting gap in the marketplace, I think.
So yeah, I'd really recommend checking out the paper
if you're interested.
There is quite a bit of genetics in the paper
which I really don't understand so I'm
kind glossing over all of that.
But they did a bunch of DNA sequencing
of the coral
and a bunch of other things to sort of figure out
exactly if it was the probiotics that were causing
the difference or if it was maybe just an adaptation
or something like that.
So if you are maybe have a background in genetics
I'd be interested to know maybe in the comments if you,
you know I if I missed something that was important
in the genetics there because it all kinda
just goes right over my head when they start talking
about gene sequencing in these papers.
But yeah, check it out, let me know what you think,
and I will talk to you next week, bye.