Experimental selection of Marylynnia puncticaudata (Cyatholaimidae, Nematoda) and effects of organic enrichment
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Experimental selection of Marylynnia puncticaudata (Cyatholaimidae, Nematoda) and effects of organic enrichment Mohamed Allouche 1 & Ahmed Nasri 1 & Abdel Halim Harrath 2 & Lamjed Mansour 2 & Hamouda Beyrem 1 & Fehmi Boufahja 1 Received: 27 November 2019 / Accepted: 28 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Meiobenthic nematodes are well-known bioindicators in aquatic ecosystem health programs. However, the explored taxa are still limited and practically devoted to the community level. The present study provided a new method of experimental isolation of a species from a pristine nematofauna. In our method, the nematofauna faced two types of sediment, namely, the leaves of Posidonia oceanica and shells of Mytilus galloprovincialis, under controlled laboratory conditions, and several changes in species composition occurred through gradual selection of the most adaptable nematode taxa to the new environments, which were previously defaunated. We used the selected nematode taxon, Marylynnia puncticaudata (Cyatholaimidae), to examine the possible effects of organic enrichment, and the results clearly showed that the body size of the nematodes significantly increased and they became fat when after enrichment using a powder made of marine agar (1200 mg l−1) and cuticles of Crangon crangon (900 mg l−1), but their relative body growth showed no discernible changes. Keywords Experimental selection . Posidonia oceanica . Mytilus galloprovincialis . Marylynnia puncticaudata . Organic enrichment . Marine agar . Crangon crangon
Introduction Numerous studies have reported the high potential of meiobenthic nematodes as a bioindicator of various environmental stressors (Semprucci et al. 2015). However, explored subjects are still monotonically based on abundance and species richness. To date, little efforts have been attempted to consider the population approach in the field of toxicology, biochemistry, or immunology, for example, using meiobenthic nematodes as a biomonitoring tool (Boufahja and Semprucci 2015; Boufahja et al. 2016). Previous studies reported that to consider these nematodes for biomonitoring,
Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Fehmi Boufahja [email protected] 1
Faculty of Sciences of Bizerte, Laboratory of Environment Biomonitoring, Coastal Ecology and Ecotoxicology Unit, University of Carthage, 7021 Zarzouna, Tunisia
2
Zoology Department, College of Science, King Saud University, Box 2455, Riyadh 11451, Saudi Arabia
the nematode community should be experimentally simplified to one species, maintained, and fed in laboratory conditions. Many published experimental studies used closed microcosms, such as glass bottles, and the effects of stress were mostly expressed by a simplification of the tested community (Mahmoudi et al. 2005; Beyrem et al. 2010; Boufahja et al. 2015; Nasri et al. 2015). However, we decided to avoid closed experimental designs with the monospecies approach because marine environment acts as an open system owing to
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