Presenters: Connor Noland
Authors: Connor Noland, Melanie Schriver
Faculty Advisor: Roger Gold
Institution: Southern Utah University
Ephemeral pools are short-term bodies of water that develop a complex, yet understudied ecosystem during periods of rainfall. Because these pools are often found in deserts, the organisms inhabiting these pools complete their entire life cycle in periods as short as two weeks. While the aquatic animals of these ephemeral pools have been well studied, the microbial elements have been largely overlooked. In this project we have sought to characterize the various bacteria and archaea found in the ephemeral pools of the Three Peaks area of Southern Utah. Water samples were collected every 48 hours from six pools distributed across three sites, which were then sequenced using Illumina next-generation sequencing and analyzed using Mothur bioinformatics analysis software (mothur.org). Alpha diversity of the microbes in the pools were calculated; the sequences were grouped into Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs,) and the percent abundance of all taxa was determined. We found that except for two pools, bacterial diversity remained fairly constant throughout the 12 day monitoring period. Those two pools experienced a dramatic increase in cyanobacteria, suggesting the presence of cyanobacterial blooms, which greatly reduced the diversity of the affected pools. The presence of common phyla across pools could indicate that there is a common set of microbial species that contribute to the success of the ephemeral pool ecosystem. Further study will help elucidate the complex interactions between macroscopic and microscopic species within these unique ecosystems.