16S microbiome metadata collected from shallow artificial reef sponges and seawater in the Florida Keys, USA from Apr 2021 to Aug 2021

Sponges are a dominant component of coral reefs worldwide and in the Caribbean, where their biomass exceeds that of reef-building corals. For almost a quarter century, the success of sponges in the Caribbean has been linked to their filter-feeding ability. However, recent work demonstrated that coexisting sponges on Caribbean reefs host unique communities of bacteria that might allow sponges to access multiple pools of nutrients that are not available to other organisms. In this project, the investigators will test the hypothesis that ecologically dominant sponge species in the Caribbean have unique metabolic strategies that are mediated by their associations with microbes that live within the sponge body.

In this dataset, we present the 16S rRNA microbiome NCBI accession and sample collection metadata for an artificial reef experiment where sponges of 10 species were placed on this temporary reef from April to August of 2021 and sampled using VacuSIP. VacuSIP methods capture incurrent (In) and excurrent (Ex) water from each sponge specimen. Incurrent represents the bacteria that are available for the sponge to consume via filter feeding and excurrent represents the bacteria that remain once sponges have consumed their preferred taxa. Additionally, we have provided microbiome metadata for the host sponges for several of these paired In/Ex samples. See the related dataset, NCBI Bioproject PRJNA1179970, for all sequence data. Microbiome data was generated using protocols from the Earth Microbiome project and sequencing was conducted on an Illumina MiSeq at Middle Tennessee State University. The data available at NCBI represents raw sequencing data, and no quality checks or sequencing filtering has been done on the uploaded sequences.