Figure 1.
PWPS on Porites lutea (A) and map of the Western Indian Ocean showing the sampling locations (B).
Table 1.
Number of samples collected for histopathology, sections analysed and diagnosis partitioned by tissue category and region.
Figure 2.
Photomicrographs of diseased Porites lutea coral tissues: Porites white patch syndrome (PWPS).
A) Cross-section showing the well-defined boundary between fragmented (FT) and diseased tissue (DT); Cd = cell debris; Ci = Ciliata. B) P. lutea with PWPS. Note ovoid basophilic bodies (bb) like bacterial aggregates; Ft = fragmented tissue. C) Cross section of P.lutea affected by PWPS showing dead tissue full of cell debris (Cd) and Cyanobacteria (Cy). D) Close-up of an ovoid basophilic body (Bb). E) Nematoda (Ne) in the tissue debris. F) Endophytic algae (ea) in dead tissues.
Figure 3.
Relative abundance (%) of bacterial phyla retrieved from three diseased (DT) and three healthy (HT) samples of Porites lutea collected in Mayotte (MAY), South Africa (RSA) and Reunion (REU).
Table 2.
Number of samples collected, clones retrieved by tissue category and region and diversity index (Shannon-Weaver).
Figure 4.
Multidimensional scaling (MDS) ordination of bacterial communities associated with healthy (HT) and PWPS-affected tissues (DT) of Porites lutea collected at Reunion (R), South Africa (RSA) and Mayotte (M).
Figure 5.
Neighbour-joining phylogenetic tree for the 16SrRNA gene sequences that were closely related to known and putative pathogens found in both healthy (HT) and Porites white patch syndrome (PWPS)-infected tissues (DT) of Porites lutea from Mayotte (MAY), South African (RSA) and Reunion (REU) corals.
Numbers at each node are bootstraps values (%) obtained after 1000 iterations.