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Microeukaryotes are a diverse and often overlooked group of microbes that are important in food webs and other ecological linkages. Little is known about microeukaryotes associated with aquatic invertebrates, although filter feeders such as mussels are likely to take in and potentially retain microeukaryotes in their gut while feeding. Microeukaryotes such as apicomplexans have been reported in marine mussel species, but no studies have examined the presence of these microorganisms in freshwater mussels or how they relate to mussel host species or environmental conditions. In this study, microbial community DNA was extracted from the gut tissue of over 300 freshwater mussels, representing 22 species collected from rivers in the southeastern USA. Microeukaryote DNA was detected using PCR amplification, followed by the sequencing of positive amplicons. Microeukaryotes were found in 167 individual mussels (53%) of those tested. Amplicons included dinoflagellates/algae that differed between mussel species and are likely food sources that were distinct from those found in water and sediment samples analyzed concurrently. A total of 5% of the positive amplicons were non-photosynthetic alveolates that could represent parasitic microeukaryotes. Understanding the distribution of microeukaryotes in the freshwater mussel gut microbiome could further our understanding of the ongoing decline of mussel populations.
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River Flow 2020 Proceedings of the 10th Conference on Fluvial Hydraulics (Delft, Netherlands, 7-10 July 2020)
Freshwater mussels are bivalve mollusks that inhabit the substrates of rivers. Fully three-dimensional large eddy simulations are used to investigate flow, turbulence and the capacity of the flow to dislocate an isolated, partially-buried, isolated freshwater mussel placed in a ful-ly-developed incoming turbulent open channel flow. The mussel is aligned with the flow di-rection, which corresponds to normal conditions in rivers containing mussel beds. Its sub-mergence depth is about 60% of the mussel height. The paper focuses on quantifying the ef-fect of the active filtering flow through the incurring and excurring siphons. Simulation re-sults are discussed for two limiting cases with no active filtering and with a filtering flow dis-charge that is close to the maximum value recorded for the investigated freshwater mussel species. It is shown that the active filtering increases the turbulent kinetic energy in the wake and slightly decreases the mean streamwise drag acting on the mussel shell. The paper also discusses the main types of large-scale coherent structures generated by partially-burrowed mussels aligned with the flow, how they are affected by the filtered flow and the effects of these eddies on the bed shear stress, sediment entrainment/deposition phenomena and nutri-ent transport
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- Award ID(s):
- 1659518
- PAR ID:
- 10206445
- Editor(s):
- Wim Uijttewaal, Mário J.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- River Flow 2020
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1201/b22619
