Microbial diversity and connectivity of herbivorous fish, sea-grass and sediments from Fiji

While marine microbial dispersal in the water column is relatively well understood, dispersal of environmental marine microbes not associated with the water columns is very poorly understood. One potential pathway for dispersal is through herbivorous fish, as they are typically highly mobile animals that often interact directly with their environment when feeding, and are known to host a variety of microbes implicated in digestive assistance. Our goal was to understand community similarity across multiple trophic levels. We therefore sampled from sediment proximal to seagrass, sediment which contained seagrass roots, the leaves of the seagrass, the epiphytes on those leaves and one fish, Calotomus spinidens (Labridae: Scarinae), which specializes on consuming seagrass (Nakamura et al. 2003). Additionally we were interested in seeing how similar coral reef communities from similar habitats, but different biogeographic provinces were, and therefore collected from forereef areas in both Fiji and Florida. Lastly, since fish detritovores are important in nutrient transfer between reefs (Max et al. 2013) we sampled the guts of several detritivorous fishes.