Pearl Oyster: from national icon to guardian of Qatar's marine environment

Abstract

The NPRP9-394-1-090 project "Pearl Oyster: from national icon to guardian of Qatar's marine environment" had as main aim to develop and apply an integrated suite of chemical and biological methods as early warning tools to assess the "health" of Qatar's marine environment. The central theme consisted in an investigative monitoring program around the use of the pearl oyster, Pictada imbricata radiata, as a sentinel or guardian species. We have characterized the main environmental contaminants of concern at a selected number of sites around the Qatari coast (UmmBab, Al Khor, Al Wakra and Simaisma), during 2 years, in summer and winter. Potential ecological effects of contaminants (targeted and untargeted) were investigated at different biological organization levels (gene, chromosome, cell, individual, population), through a multidisciplinary approach, using classical and genotoxicological endpoints, integrative histopathology and transcriptomic responses to the different environmental stresses. To our knowledge, this is the first time an integrated approach connecting all these disciplines has been applied in the Qatari marine environment. We present here the main results, of this 3 years project, obtained in all different disciplinary approaches. The results of this project will leave a legacy of resources for future Qatari researchers, including an open access transcriptome data base and the first description of common pathologies observed in the pearl oyster P. i. radiata. Moreover, they will also represent a sound science-based baseline data essential for conservation and management planning, by integration of the data from all the different disciplines applied in the project to assess the potential ecological effects of contaminants at different biological levels.