Impact of environmental bacterial communities on fish health in marine recirculating aquaculture systems

Marine cultured fish diseases caused by bacteria in recirculating aquaculture systems (RASs) greatly threaten fish aquaculture. To date, the dynamics of bacterial populations in RAS and their impacts to fish health remain largely unknown. In the present study, the bacterial communities in the water from two different marine RASs were analyzed using pyrosequencing technique. Fish disease syndromes and mortality had been reported from one RAS (RAS-d) while the fish in the other RAS remained healthy (RAS-h). The diversity of bacteria in each RAS and the abundance of each bacterium were identified based on sequencing the V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene. A total number of 107,476 effective sequences were obtained from the pyrosequencing results. 640 and 844 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were identified in RAS-d and RAS-h, respectively. In order level, tags annotation showed that Vibrionales and Flavobacteriales were the predominant strains in RAS-d with a relative abundance 50.5% and 36.5%, respectively. In contrast, the bacterial community in RAS-h contained 35.8% Vibrionales,17.3% Alteromonadales, 10.7% Rhodobacterales, 7.43% Kordiimonadales, and 6.26% Oceanospirillales. In addition, the Vibrionaceae in the RAS-d represented 6.98% of the population which was significantly higher than that in RAS-h (0.40%). More potential pathogenic bacteria in fish, such as Vibrio harveyi, Vibrio rodferianus were also found in the bacterial population in RAS-d. The results also showed that the bacteria community in RAS-h was more diverse and balanced than in RAS-d. These findings of this study suggested a potential correlation between fish diseases and environmental bacterial populations. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V.