About This Project

Yellow tang are vital to Hawaii’s reef ecosystems, but wild populations have been drastically declining due to the aquarium trade. Aquaculture is a sustainable alternative to removing fish from the wild, but only a fraction of cultured yellow tang survive to adulthood. We suspect investigating the microbiome will provide key insights to this problem. Our goal is to increase the success of the Oceanic Institute's aquaculture program and reduce impact on wild yellow tang populations.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Yellow tang (YT) are one of the most desired species in the growing aquarium trade with 300,000 to 400,000 being removed from the wild annually. This has caused a dramatic decline in their populations so much so that Hawaii has temporarily banned the removal of YT from the wild. Researchers at the Oceanic Institute set out to try and culture YT with the goal of being a sustainable alternative to the aquarium demands and reduce impact on wild populations. This has proved difficult as only a fraction of YT reach adulthood preventing commercial scale production. The reason for such high mortality is unknown but the gut microbiome, which is key to vertebrate's development, is suspected to play a key role.

What is the significance of this project?

Coral reefs serve as one of the foundational components of our ocean's ecosystems and reef fish like yellow tang play a vital role in the health and functioning of these reefs. This makes protecting wild populations incredibly important. We hypothesize high mortality in aquaculture is linked to both the absence of positive interactions with microbes encountered by wild yellow tang and the increase in negative interactions with pathogenic microbes that may be present in aquaculture. If we can determine this is true, the Oceanic Institute can use this information to adjust rearing techniques. Improving our knowledge of how to culture yellow tang will directly benefit wild populations and the coral reef ecosystems they are apart of.

What are the goals of the project?

Using the yellow tang as a model, the overarching goal of this study is to understand how the microbiome of reef fishes affects survivorship in cultured populations, and to manipulate it for more successful aquaculture programs. We will do this by first extracting DNA from the guts of larval yellow tang following the first feeding when mortality is at its peak. We will take samples from individuals who die following the first feeding and from those who survive. We will then sequence and amplify this DNA from both respective sample groups to identify the types of bacteria present in their gut. Finally, we will compare the microbial communities from larval surviving and deceased fish, as well as adult yellow tang identify patterns between microbial communities and survivorship.