The skin microbiome of cow‐nose rays (Rhinoptera bonasus) in an aquarium touch‐tank exhibit

Abstract

Public aquaria offer numerous educational opportunities for visitors while touch-tank exhibits offer guests the ability to directly interact with marine life via physical contact. Despite the popularity of touch-tanks, there is a paucity of research about animal health in these exhibits and, in particular, there is little research on the microbial communities in these highly interactive exhibits. Microbial community structure can have implications for both host health and habitat function. To better understand the microbiome of a touch-tank we used high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene to analyze the microbial community on the dorsal and ventral surfaces of cow-nose rays (Rhinoptera bonasus) as well as their environment in a frequently visited touch-tank exhibit at the New England Aquarium. Our analyses revealed a distinct microbial community associated with the skin of the ray that had lower diversity than the surrounding habitat. The ray skin was dominated by three orders: Burkholderiales (∼55%), Flavobacteriales (∼19%), and Pseudomonadales (∼12%), taxonomic groups commonly associated with other fish species. Our results provide a survey of ray-associated bacterial communities in a touch-tank environment, thereby laying the foundation for future studies examining the role of potential challenges to ray microbiota and their associated health.

Microbiome Shifts Associated With the Introduction of Wild Atlantic Horseshoe Crabs (Limulus polyphemus) Into a Touch-Tank Exhibit

“…This might facilitate the transfer of human-associated taxa to the captive horseshoe crabs. This is in direct opposition to a study on cownose rays in touch tanks, which concluded that the transfer of human-associated taxa to the rays was negligible ( Kearns et al, 2017 ). Cultural analyses of hemolymph samples from captive Limulus resulted in the isolation of several bacterial species associated with pathological conditions, including Shewanella putrefaciens (formerly Pseudomonas putrefaciens ) and Aeromonas hydrophila ( Khashe and Janda, 1998 ; LaDouceur et al, 2019 ).…”

Microbiome shifts associated with the introduction of wild Atlantic horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) into a touch-tank exhibit

“…This might facilitate the transfer of human-associated taxa to the captive horseshoe crabs. This is in direct opposition to a study on cownose rays in touch tanks, which concluded that the transfer of human-associated taxa to the rays was negligible (Kearns et al, 2017).…”

Skin and stinger bacterial communities in two critically endangered rays from the South Atlantic in natural and aquarium settings

“…In recent years, the microbiomes of fish skin have been increasingly studied, and it is becoming clear that microorganisms associated with fish play an important role in the health of these animals have reported that host microbiomes are influenced by the presence of bacteria in the surrounding environment but that the hosts select this microbial community, and usually, the water has only a secondary influence (Chiarello et al, 2015;Doane et al, 2017;Kearns et al, 2017;Kueneman et al, 2014;Larsen et al, 2013;Santos et al, 2014). (Ritchie et al, 2017).…”