Abstract
Bacterial communities associated with insects can substantially influence host ecology, evolution and behaviour. Host diet is a key factor that shapes bacterial communities, but the impact of dietary transitions across insect development is poorly understood. We analysed bacterial communities of 12 butterfly species across different developmental stages, using amplicon sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene. Butterfly larvae typically consume leaves of a single host plant, whereas adults are more generalist nectar feeders. Thus, we expected bacterial communities to vary substantially across butterfly development. Surprisingly, only few species showed significant dietary and developmental transitions in bacterial communities, suggesting weak impacts of dietary transitions across butterfly development. On the other hand, bacterial communities were strongly influenced by butterfly species and family identity, potentially due to dietary and physiological variation across the host phylogeny. Larvae of most butterfly species largely mirrored bacterial community composition of their diets, suggesting passive acquisition rather than active selection. Overall, our results suggest that although butterflies harbour distinct microbiomes across taxonomic groups and dietary guilds, the dramatic dietary shifts that occur during development do not impose strong selection to maintain distinct bacterial communities across all butterfly hosts.
Highlights
All animals are associated with bacterial communities, and this association can significantly affect host biology [1,2,3,4]
We observed that most of the bacterial classes, orders and families that dominated our focal butterfly species were similar to those previously described for Lepidopterans [28,29,40,48,49] and other insects [23,24]
Our results indicate that dietary and developmental switches in butterflies have variable but generally weak impacts on their bacterial communities because we used whole insect bodies for microbiome analysis, we acknowledge that these results do not account for potential location-specific variation in bacterial abundance across development [50]
Summary
All animals are associated with bacterial communities, and this association can significantly affect host biology [1,2,3,4]. Bacteria can provide various benefits to insects, including efficient digestion, nutrient 2 supplementation and detoxification; and can help insects to survive on suboptimal diets and occupy diverse dietary niches [7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. Through their impact on nutrient acquisition, bacteria can significantly alter traits such as host fecundity, survival and longevity [8,14,15,16,17]. To better understand insect ecology, evolution and behaviour, it is important to determine the factors that affect insect–bacterial associations
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