Project: CAREER: Species Interactions of Coral Reef Benthic Cyanobacterial Mats: Within-Mat Diversity Promotes Both Facilitation and Top-Down Control

NSF Award Abstract:
Nuisance algal blooms are a massive conservation challenge to global ecosystems. Benthic cyanobacterial mats (BCMs) can be persistent in time and spatially expansive on coral reefs, posing additional environmental threats through physical smothering of and chemical interactions with other reef organisms, including corals. This research seeks to understand processes that lead to bloom longevity, such as metabolic cooperation between microbial species, and to study natural mechanisms of bloom control, such as the combination of large-bodied predators, reef fish, and viruses. The research team leverages research results towards coral reef management to develop globally-applicable SCUBA diver interventions to control cyanobacterial blooms and develops training materials and lead workshops for the Caribbean dive and snorkel tourism industries to scale up the use of diver interventions over the 5-year project. The education plan focuses on high-investment training of undergraduate research interns from UNC’s transfer student population together with training opportunities for postdoctoral researchers, graduate, undergraduate, and high school students, generates data to be integrated into publicly available undergraduate-level bioinformatics case studies, and develops K-12 educational materials through the International Microbiology Literacy Initiative.

Understanding ecological processes that lead to prolonged blooms are a major research gap addressed by this research, which focuses on metabolic facilitation and top-down controls on BCMs. The research makes three major contributions to our knowledge of the functional ecology of marine cyanobacterial mats via (1) mechanistic characterization of within-mat metabolic handoffs, (2) identification of viral-driven changes to within-mat metabolic cooperation, and (3) description of interactions between micro- (viral) and macro-scale (fish) predation. Regardless of whether specific hypotheses are supported, the data generated by this research greatly advance the field of viral trophic ecology by testing ecological theory using a mechanistic hypothesis to understand biogeochemical outcomes of functional mosaics between density-dependent lysis-lysogeny switches. This project is expected to produce evidence for the roles of cooperative interactions among mat-building bacteria and bloom control by multiple predators including reef fish and viruses. Viral ecology is difficult to study in natural microbial systems, and thus this project contributes to our knowledge about the ecological roles of viruses in natural contexts.

This award is supported by the Biological Oceanography and Ocean Education Programs.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.