Kraemer, Philipp, Gerlach, Gabriele, and Brinkhoff, Thorsten (2020) Diversity and flexibility of the bacterial communities on Cancer pagurus at different temperatures. Journal of Sea Research, 156. 101827.

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Abstract

The brown crab Cancer pagurus is widely distributed in east Atlantic coastal areas and has great ecological and commercial importance, but in many populations a high proportion of crabs with syndromes of shell disease are found. A detailed analysis of the epibiotic bacterial communities associated to the shell of C. pagurus is still missing. Therefore, we analyzed the normal bacterial community associated with C. pagurus and in two crab populations living at different water temperatures. Specimens were collected in the North Sea and 1,500 km north in Norway, and their associated bacterial communities were analyzed under natural and experimentally changed temperature regimes. The identified bacterial communities consisted of a combination of taxa known from other marine crabs and marine surfaces. Some bacterial communities of C. pagurus were similar to those of North American lobsters, which are strongly susceptible towards epizootic shell disease. Many bacterial taxa with potential chitinolytic activity were found such as Aquimarina and Kiloniella, involved in the onset of epizootic shell disease. An exposure for five days of C. pagurus specimens to different temperature regimes showed only slight effects on the diversity of epibiotic bacterial communities. Differences in the abundance of bacterial classes such as the Flavobacteriia, Gammaproteobacteria or Deltaproteobacteria were observed, in combination with a decrease in alpha diversity under cold conditions. This study gives the first overview of normal epibiotic bacterial communities living on the carapace of C. pagurus and provides results concerning the influence of different temperatures on the associated bacterial community composition.

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