Author: Altrim Mamuti, Zameena Bhairo
Mentor: Lalitha Jayant
Institution: BMCC
Abstract: Contact Mentor
Identification and Characterization of Marine Bacteria Associated with Lytechinus variegatus
Promoting research and scholarly activity among faculty and students
Author: Altrim Mamuti, Zameena Bhairo
Mentor: Lalitha Jayant
Institution: BMCC
Abstract: Contact Mentor
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Abel Navarro
Congrats for the great work! One question, do you guys think there is an effect from the packing/delivery of the sea urchin? They were purchased from a company that obviously did not keep with animals under the appropriate, light, oxygen, salinity, natural nutrients, presence of other organisms, etc. Many bacteria are sensitive to these conditions. Some natural bacteria might have died on the way to your lab, and maybe some new bacteria might have been introduced.
Altrim Mamuti
Professor Navarro, Thank you for your question.
This is something that has come to my mind as well. Back in 2020 Spring (Me) and before that Dr. Jayant’s team have purchased Lytechinus Variegatus from Carolina Biological vendors. I did some research on them – they have vendors in Florida (that’s where they actually catch the green sea urchin which is our target species) If we do a simple calculation they do not ship the specimens from North Carolina but from Florida. Meaning that they go under a much longer trip than we thought. Our main problem has been the water temperature and the pH of the water inside the bags. However we have not observed any contamination from other harmful bacteria that may have been picked from the packaging process.
I have communicated with Carolina Biological and they informed me that their vendor for sea urchins is located in Florida Keys and that they do not sterilize the bags (plastic) where they place the organisms to ship them.
Our hypothesis states: that we want to characterize and identify any bacteria that are associated with Lytechinus v. Understanding that all organisms carry a certain variety of bacteria and can be picked up at any place. The bacteria that we have found are mainly marine bacteria. This diminishes the probability that land (or) bacteria that survive in dry surface, packaging, plastic, aquarium water with oscillating pHs can be part of the urchin. The main goal here is to observe bacteria that coexist symbiotically. Meaning that invading bacteria (or bacteria that don;t usually coexist with urchins) might as well cause bleaching, demolishing spines, changes in color and killing of the organism and we haven’t seen that to be our case so far. We have had a challenge maintaining sea urchins healthy due to low aquarium conditions and unstable pH in our waters mainly caused by changes in temperature and exposing the urchins under lighting.
A good measurement to prove the doubt of other bacteria being added to our batch not as initial original symbiotes is by collecting live sea urchins on a self funded trip to Florida – staining the bacteria found directly by a sea urchin collected from the reef and then drawing a comparison with our results. That can be a fun project for me in the summer.
I hope that answers your question!