| description |
The incidence of fish diseases is closely associated with the microbial composition in surrounding water, but it remains uncertain whether microbial indicator phylotypes are predictive for shrimp health status (healthy or diseased). To test this idea, we combined data from our previous works, to investigate bacterioplankton temporal dynamics, specifically applied indicator phylotypes as independent variables to predict the health status during a shrimp culture procedure. The results showed linearly increased dissimilarities (P < 0.001) of the bacterioplankton community over time, while the communities dramatically deviated from this defined trend when disease occurred. This sudden shift in the bacterial communities appears to result in severe mass mortality of the shrimps. In particular, we identified 13 indicative families (in which 7 for healthy indicators and 6 for diseased indictors) that discriminated ponds with diseased shrimp populations from these with healthy shrimp populations. An improved logistic regression model additionally revealed that the occurrences of these indicator families could be predictive of the shrimp health status with a high degree of accuracy (> 79%). Overall, this study provides solid evidences that indicator phylotypes could be served as independent variables for predicting the incidence of shrimp diseases. |