One of the best-documented aspects of the biology of lumi-nous bacteria has been their abundance and distribution in the marine environment (reviewed in reference 51). This has re-sulted in part from the relative ease of studying these micro-organisms; the bioluminescence produced by most of the col-onies formed by this group of bacteria makes them readily recognizable upon primary isolation, and a robust and simple phenotype-based taxonomy is available for species-level iden-tification (66). Past studies have demonstrated that marine luminous bacteria, and Vibrio fischeri in particular, are remark-ably successful at adapting to a variety of ecological niches (50). They are commonly present as planktonic cells in seawa-ter or sediments (59, 63, 70, 74), and as saprophytes they populate fecal material and the surfaces of dead or dying marine animals (1, 8, 37). V. fischeri and other luminous bac-teria also form a variety of pathogenic and cooperative asso-ciations with marine animals: they are increasingly recognized as causes of invertebrate diseases (2, 22, 38, 77); they are a common constituent of enteric tract microbial consortia (60, 64, 72); and they encompass the four described species (V. fis-cheri, Vibrio logei, Photobacterium phosphoreum, and Photobac-terium leiognathi) that form stable, cooperative associations in specialized symbiotic organs of marine squids and fishes (18, 51). Although many studies have reported specific niches and predictable patterns in geographical distribution for luminous bacterial species (17, 50, 59), the factors underlying their eco-logical dynamics (e.g., their movement between niches and their formation of stable subspecies or biovars) have, until re-cently, been poorly understood. We discuss here what is cur-rently known about the extent to which the population of planktonic V. fischeri can influence, or be influenced by, its ex-istence in symbiotic niches (24, 50).
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Ruby et al. (1998) studied this question.