Meeting Abstract
Palau, an archipelago of islands in Micronesia, is home to a handful of the world’s only marine lakes known to host hundreds of thousands to millions of Mastigias papua medusae. Though these populations fluctuate year to year, how the lakes have the capacity to sustain these potentially massive populations is unclear. The only perturbation known to cause drastic die off is a sudden increase in temperature, brought on by events such as El Niño. An El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) perturbation with a predicted Niño 3.4 Sea Surface Temperature (SST) index, possibly surpassing the 1997 El Niño, is anticipated to arrive for the coming year. The influence abiotic factors—like temperature fluctuations from ENSO events—have on population dynamics with respect to biotic relationships is poorly understood. This study is the first to ask how the Mastigias papua population of Jellyfish Lake (Ongeim’l Tketau), and its microbial community, recovers after an abiotic-sourced perturbation. By utilizing comparative molecular techniques, this research aims to address the posed question by first (1) describing what microbes are present in the environment versus the Mastigias papua host before an ENSO event via 16S and ITS sequencing and (2) determining what genes may be associated with immune response via Mastigias papua genome assembly and annotation. Preliminary results will provide a foundation for developing hypotheses on what the genetic and microbial drivers are for recovery within a marine host-symbiont relationship after an abiotic-sourced perturbation, and if there is an association between these drivers and immune response in the host.
