ArticleThe ISME journal2021
Beach sand oil spills select for generalist microbial populations.
Article in The ISME journal, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Moisture-driven redox dynamics shape oil-degrading microbiomes in tropical intertidal sands.Environmental science and ecotechnology · 2026Article
- Comparative metagenomics reveals the metabolic flexibility of coastal prokaryotic microbiomes contributing to lignin degradation.Biotechnology for biofuels and bioproducts · 2025Article
- Quantifying the contribution of the rare biosphere to natural disturbances.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Discovery and cultivation of prokaryotic taxa in the age of metagenomics and artificial intelligence.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Ecological success of extreme halophiles subjected to recurrent osmotic disturbances is primarily driven by congeneric species replacement.The ISME journal · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The specialization-disturbance hypothesis predicts that, in the event of a disturbance, generalists are favored, while specialists are selected against. This hypothesis has not been rigorously tested in microbial systems and it remains unclear to what extent it could explain microbial community succession patterns following perturbations. Previous field observations of Pensacola Beach sands that were impacted by the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill provided evidence in support of the specialization-disturbance hypothesis. However, ecological drift as well as uncounted environmental fluctuations (e.g., storms) could not be ruled out as confounding factors driving these field results. In this study, the specialization-disturbance hypothesis was tested on beach sands, disturbed by DWH crude oil, ex situ in closed laboratory advective-flow chambers that mimic in situ conditions in saturated beach sediments. The chambers were inoculated with weathered DWH oil and unamended chambers served as controls. The time series of shotgun metagenomic and 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequence data from a two-month long incubation showed that functional diversity significantly increased while taxonomic diversity significantly declined, indicating a decrease in specialist taxa. Thus, results from this laboratory study corroborate field observations, providing verification that the specialization-disturbance hypothesis can explain microbial succession patterns in crude oil impacted beach sands.
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