| Summary: | Aquatic Sciences Meeting, Aquatic Sciences: Global And Regional Perspectives - North Meets South, 22-27 February 2015, Granada, Spain It has been proposed that marine sponges will benefit from future global warming and ocean acidification scenarios in coral reef systems. A potential phase shift relies on the evidence of coral degradation as well as on the robustness of sponges to these environmental changes. Marine sponges establish permanent and temporal associations with a large variety of microorganisms that contribute to the performance of the holobiont. Ocean acidification may affect the sponge microbiome by modifying community composition and function, and these differences could be related to the capacity of sponges to cope with acidification. Here, we examined whether the effect of pH variation on high microbial abundance species (HMA) differ from that of low microbial abundance species (LMA) on Mediterranean sponges. The response of HMA and LMA species under actual and current projections on acidification for the next few centuries was examined by measuring the holobiont response (growth of the sponge), the surface of the sponge occupied by associated bacteria and bacterial composition (16S rDNA pyrosequencing). Our results reveal contrasting effects on sponge growth between the examined HMA and LMA species. Peer Reviewed
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