Analysis of the Gull Fecal Microbial Community Reveals the Dominance of Catellicoccus marimammalium in Relation to Culturable Enterococci
ABSTRACTGulls are prevalent in beach environments and can be a major source of fecal contamination. Gulls have been shown to harbor a high abundance of fecal indicator bacteria (FIB), such asEscherichia coliand enterococci, which can be readily detected as part of routine beach monitoring. Despite the ubiquitous presence of gull fecal material in beach environments, the associated microbial community is relatively poorly characterized. We generated comprehensive microbial community profiles of gull fecal samples using Roche 454 and Illumina MiSeq platforms to investigate the composition and variability of the gull fecal microbial community and to measure the proportion of FIB.EnterococcaceaeandEnterobacteriaceaewere the two most abundant families in our gull samples. Sequence comparisons between short-read data and nearly full-length 16S rRNA gene clones generated from the same samples revealedCatellicoccus marimammaliumas the most numerous taxon among all samples. The identification of bacteria from gull fecal pellets cultured on membrane-Enterococcusindoxyl-β-d-glucoside (mEI) plates showed that the dominant sequences recovered in our sequence libraries did not represent organisms culturable on mEI. Based on 16S rRNA gene sequencing of gull fecal isolates cultured on mEI plates, 98.8% were identified asEnterococcusspp., 1.2% were identified asStreptococcusspp., and none were identified asC. marimammalium. Illumina deep sequencing indicated that gull fecal samples harbor significantly higher proportions ofC. marimammalium16S rRNA gene sequences (>50-fold) relative to typical mEI culturableEnterococcusspp.C. marimammaliumtherefore can be confidently utilized as a genetic marker to identify gull fecal pollution in the beach environment.