DIFFERENCES OF COPEPODA COMPOSITION ANALYSIS IN MARICULTURE PONDS THROUGH MORPHOLOGICAL TAXONOMY AND DIFFERENT METAGENETIC APPROACHES

. Copepods play a fundamental role in aquatic ecosystems and are an important food source for fish at an early stage. However, little attention has been given to changes in copepod communities in aquaculture water. This is mainly limited by the copepod analysis method. In this study, we designed a pair of copepod primers, Cop18SF/Cop18SR, for the analysis of copepod communities to promote the investigation of copepods in aquaculture water. Our results showed that the common-used primer pair Uni18S/Uni18SR non-specifically amplified many DNA sequences from bacteria, whereas the primer pair LSUCop-D2F/LSUCop-D2R abnormally enriched OTU denovo438, which was an unidentified Eukaryota zooplankton. Although Eurytemora pacifica was classified into 26 OTUs with 97% sequence identity using our designed primer pair Cop18SF/Cop18SR, other results indicated that the primer pair Cop18SF/Cop18SR was superior to the other two primer pairs. Moreover, different primer pairs yielded different plankton community structures, which caused their correlations with environmental factors to be obviously different. These results imply that the primer pair Cop18SF/Cop18SR can be used to analyze the dynamic changes in the copepod community structure and the relationship between the community structure and abiotic and biological factors in aquaculture water.